Tag Archives: dnsbl

Generator Labs: Blacklist and Certificate Monitoring for Email and Infrastructure Teams

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Generator Labs provides infrastructure monitoring for teams that need to stay ahead of two specific problems: IP and domain blacklistings that kill email deliverability, and SSL certificates that expire without warning. Both products run in the same portal, so you manage everything in one place.

Blacklist Monitoring

Blacklist monitoring runs continuous checks of your IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, and domains against hundreds of RBL and URIBL data sources. The moment a listing is detected, alerts go out through whatever channels you have configured: email, SMS, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, or webhooks.

Coverage is the differentiator. Free one-shot tools check a handful of the major lists. Generator Labs checks well over a hundred data sources on a schedule, including 30+ premium sources on Enterprise and Ultimate plans that free tools do not cover. You get notified when something changes; you are not logging in to run a manual check.

Other features worth knowing:

Full IPv6 support. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are both monitored across all plans. As more mail infrastructure goes dual-stack, IPv6 blacklisting is a real and growing issue that most monitoring tools still treat as secondary.

Shareable public reports. Every monitored host gets a public report URL you can hand to a client, ISP, or manager without giving anyone portal access.

REST API. Full programmatic access to monitoring data and controls, with client libraries for PHP, Node.js, and Python.

Generator Labs RBL Monitoring hosts list

Blacklist Monitoring Pricing

  • Free: 1 host, 48-hour check interval, 100+ data sources. Free forever, no credit card required.
  • Professional: $8/month for 20 hosts at 24-hour intervals.
  • Enterprise: $16/month for 50 hosts at 12-hour intervals, premium data sources, custom run times.
  • Ultimate: $0.005 per check, unlimited hosts, custom intervals, all premium sources.

The Ultimate pay-per-check plan scales cleanly for larger deployments. Running 50 hosts daily against 150 data sources works out to roughly $11/month.

Certificate Monitoring

Certificate monitoring tracks SSL/TLS certificate expirations across your domains and sends alerts before anything expires. Add your domains, set alert thresholds, and the service runs automatically from there.

Both publicly-trusted and private or internal CA certificates are supported, which matters for teams running internal infrastructure that does not go through a public CA. Certificate expiry causes outages that are entirely preventable; automated monitoring removes the spreadsheet tracking and calendar reminders that most teams fall back on.

Generator Labs Certificate Monitoring monitors list

Monitoring profiles let you define reusable alert configurations across multiple monitors. Set custom expiration alert windows (5, 15, 30, 60 days, or any combination you need), choose which failure types trigger alerts, and assign private CAs or internal monitoring agents. One profile can cover dozens of monitors.

Generator Labs Certificate Monitoring add profile dialog

Certificate Monitoring Pricing

Certificate monitoring is priced at $0.01 per host per day, with no fixed tiers. You pay for what you monitor and can add or remove domains at any time.

Who It Is For

  • Email service providers and hosting companies monitoring large IP ranges
  • IT and security teams who need immediate notification when a host gets listed
  • Organizations managing many domains who need certificate expiry visibility without manual tracking
  • Developers who want API access to monitoring data for automation or integration

Get Started

Generator Labs offers continuous blacklist monitoring and certificate monitoring with solid alert coverage and a complete API. The free tier is a real free tier. Sign up at portal.generatorlabs.com to get started, no credit card required.

How Do RBLs Affect Me? (Part 3)

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Originally posted on Generator Labs

In Part 1 and Part 2 of our series, I talked about what RBLs are, how they work, and how RBLs are used by administrators to control the day-to-day onslaught of SPAM on their email systems. In this article I’m going to talk about how RBLs affect you, your business, and why you should care.

So Why Do I Care?

Getting listed on an RBL or URIBL is not uncommon- it happens.

  • Maybe you have a customer using your email platform that didn’t quite understand the rules against bulk email.
  • Maybe one of your employees downloaded some virus infested software that started sending SPAM to all the contacts in their email client.
  • Maybe your email administrator made a mistake when configuring your email system, and opened you up as an open relay.
  • Maybe the WordPress or Drupal installation on your website was compromised, and injected with phishing code.

We all do our best to ensure that these types of errors aren’t the norm, but human error happens.

As a mail recipient, RBLs protect you from these issues by rejecting these messages before they land in your inbox. As a mail sender, RBLs protect others FROM your issues- and limit your overall liability, by reducing the number of messages delivered.

By listing compromised mail servers and website domains, and using these RBLs and URIBLs in our mail systems, we effectively limit the spread of SPAM and phishing websites, which is good for everybody.

Sounds Great- What’s the Catch?

Once you’re listed- as the name indicates- you’re “black-holed”- much of your email won’t be reaching its destination, and traffic to your websites could be limited.

If your business relies on email communication- either as a tool, or a product- then the longer you’re listed, the worst it is for your bottom line, and your reputation. It looks really bad if your customers email you, and get a bounce message indicating that your email system has been blocked.

The sooner you know there is an issue, the sooner the issue can be resolved, and the sooner you can request delisting from the RBLs in question.

Generator Labs

Generator Labs provides a fully automated RBL monitoring service, which checks your IP addresses and website domains, against a customizable list of the top DNSBLs, and will alert you immediately if your system is listed.

Don’t wait days or weeks to find out that your email hasn’t been reaching your customers- click here to find out more!