[A reader in Australia sent me this info. Interestingly enough I realised afterwards, that only emails from one company were bouncing. And the very next day, they went through fine. So I don’t know whether someone was just testing it or what. But I’ve not seen the bounces again. Jan]

SpamCop is but one of several independently maintained blacklists of mail servers that have been reported as being the originator of spam mail. Many ISPs refer to this blacklist as part of their anti-spam strategy and will not accept mail that comes from a blacklisted server.

It’s the ISP mail server that’s blacklisted, not AfricanCrisis, and your ISP will have to go through the tedious process of getting unlisted. If you run your own mail server, then you’ll need to do it yourself.

The process involves beefing up the mail server security in a variety of ways, then submitting its name to SpamCop for them to test the server to see if it’s still capable of sending spam.

A mail server gets blacklisted when just one of its users (which could be any one of several thousand ISP subscribers) sends spam, because it’s the server that’s blacklisted, not the individual sender’s PC. The originator of the spam may be sending it intentionally. However, it’s more likely that it’s a trojan or worm that the individual has picked up, and is innocently sending out spam. In other words, their PC has been hijacked and turned into what’s called a “zombie server”.

Bottom line? It’s nothing personal toward you.