Ask HN: How tarnished is this domain name?
I have a project I&#x27;ve been pretty excited about, which is basically building a Hacker News for the education profession. I tried to register educatornews.org, only to find it had been registered a few months before. I saw that it wasn&#x27;t being used, so I wrote to the registrant. He had no real plans for it, so he happily transferred it to me at no cost. He told me, however, that he had used it to run a mailserver and it might be on some blacklists.<p>I thought little of it until I emailed a friend about the project for the first time. My email was rejected, and when I looked at the rejection message, this is the error I saw:<p>The error that the other server returned was:
550 An address in this message (at educatornews . org) is listed on sbl-multi.rbl.spamrl.com. Please organise removal and retry.<p>I found a page that claims to help a domain get removed from the SURBL blacklist, but I have no idea how legitimate this is: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surbl.org&#x2F;faqs#whitelist<p>Does anyone have any experience dealing with domains that have been blacklisted because of use by a previous registrant? Should I try to get it de-listed? Should I abandon the domain and find one that has never been used? I don&#x27;t want new users&#x27; registration emails to be blocked because of these issues.