Ok, there are things worse than being listed in SPEWS. At least with SPEWS, if you can manage to contact them and get the problem resolved that got your ISP listed, you have a chance of getting out easily, and you'll get out with everyone who listed you. Lo unto those whose IP is listed for good reason...

As I mentioned before, our new ISP/address range for Neotonic was blocked by SPEWS. At first, I thought this was just more collateral damage. It wasn't. In fact, the previous owner of the range we received was a spammer. We were unlisted by SPEWS fairly easily/quickly (in less than a month)... but we still can't send mail to random domains, including such stalwarts as Xerox and Sybase most recently. This is because many mail admins have blocked us themselves. There is no way for us to notify everyone saying "We aren't them, please unblock us" so we just have to watch the bounces for our customers and individually mail each postmaster and hope our mail gets through, and that the postmaster bothers to do anything about it. I'm beginning to think we should have demanded a different address range from our bandwidth provider...