Getting a Njalla domain off of Spamhaus's lists
cy-x.net was put on Spamhaus's DBL blocklist back in September-October 2025. We wanted to ignore Spamhaus as a "fuck you, let me have my anonymity" move, but it turns out that it's incredibly difficult to pull off when people are emailing you from addresses belonging to the email cartels and you can't respond to inquiries because you're on a silly little list.
We moved away from Kyun (a "bulletproof" hosting provider without KYC) over to a more reputable provider to reduce costs back in December/January. We also reconfigured our domain to ensure there were no problems there and enabled IPv6 support. Two weeks ago, we contacted Spamhaus again to see if they'd be willing to let us off their list. After a week, we got a response stating that the last problem they had with us was that we were using Njalla's nameservers. Oh, ok. Not a problem.
I spun up Technitium and set our nameservers in Njalla to our own (ns1.cy-x.net, for example). Two days later, I contacted Spamhaus one last time. I got the generic "Martin Adams" bot response, so I probed again, and we were taken off the DBL the next day. Now we get to have a private Njalla domain AND better nameservers (it often took hours for zone changes in Njalla's panel to propagate, meanwhile it's instantaneous on our self-hosted servers...)! Woohoo!
Even better, we can now use a private DNS server across all of our devices and know that none of our queries are being sold or exported, because I'm the guy running the service on the server that I pay for and manage!
Looking forward to your thoughts on this approach.
We moved away from Kyun (a "bulletproof" hosting provider without KYC) over to a more reputable provider to reduce costs back in December/January. We also reconfigured our domain to ensure there were no problems there and enabled IPv6 support. Two weeks ago, we contacted Spamhaus again to see if they'd be willing to let us off their list. After a week, we got a response stating that the last problem they had with us was that we were using Njalla's nameservers. Oh, ok. Not a problem.
I spun up Technitium and set our nameservers in Njalla to our own (ns1.cy-x.net, for example). Two days later, I contacted Spamhaus one last time. I got the generic "Martin Adams" bot response, so I probed again, and we were taken off the DBL the next day. Now we get to have a private Njalla domain AND better nameservers (it often took hours for zone changes in Njalla's panel to propagate, meanwhile it's instantaneous on our self-hosted servers...)! Woohoo!
Even better, we can now use a private DNS server across all of our devices and know that none of our queries are being sold or exported, because I'm the guy running the service on the server that I pay for and manage!
Looking forward to your thoughts on this approach.