Contabo IP reputation hell, whole /22 blacklisted

Hello, I move server to new provider in Contabo and now all my transactional email bounce. They say IP reputation is bad. I check and yes, whole /22 is in Spamhaus and Barracuda. I make a server up but email not work. Previous tenant must send lot of spam. I open ticket with Contabo but they say "clean your IP" but IP is not mine originally. What I can do? I think about SWIP update but not sure how. Regards

So I had this exact thing happen back in 2019 when I moved a client over to OVHcloud and the ip was on like seven different blacklists and I spent three weeks going back and forth with the RBLs and the hosting provider and the previous owner of the ip block and it turned out the previous tenant had been running some kind of affiliate marketing operation that was basically spam and the rbls dont care about your sob story at all they just see the history and the asn and the whole range gets flagged and I tried to explain that this was a new assignment and they wanted proof of the swip and the loa and it was a nightmare and the client was breathing down my neck the whole time and I learned that you really need to check the reputation before you migrate anything and now I always run a full rbl check on every single ip before I even spin up the vps and I use a bunch of different tools and I

Oh this reminds me of when my cousin got married in 2014 and they sent all the invitations through this cheap email service and half of them bounced and my aunt was furious because she thought people were snubbing her and it turned out the service was on a dirty ip block and then last week I was trying to order yarn for my knitting club from this shop in oregon and their confirmation email went to spam and I almost missed the pickup window and that made me think about how fragile the whole email ecosystem is and also my neighbor's dog barks at the mailman every tuesday which is weird because the mailman changes and its like the dog knows the uniform and I used to run a small web design business back in 2017 and we had a client on Vultr who had deliverability issues and I spent a whole weekend trying to fix their dns and it was spf this and dkim that and dmarc whatever and none of it m

Yeah this is why you always check the ip before you pay lol Contabo been sketchy about this for years their whole asn is basically a dice roll you might get clean ip you might get one that was used for sketchy crypto stuff or spam or worse lol I got a /29 from them once and 3 of the 5 usable were on sorbs lol their support just copypaste "please contact the rbl directly" lol lmao

The SWIP update is the correct first step, though it will not immediately resolve your listing. You need to ensure the IP block has current SWIP/RWHOIS pointing to your organization, then include that documentation in your delisting requests.

For Spamhaus specifically, use their removal form and attach the LOA from Contabo. Note that Spamhaus lists by policy rationale (PBL, SBL, CSS) and each has different removal criteria. The /22 being listed suggests SBL or CSS; if it's SBL due to previous tenant, removal is achievable with proper documentation. If it's CSS, the listing decays automatically with clean behavior over 30-90 days.

RBL appeals are not futile, but they require correct procedure. Many operators fail because they submit incomplete documentation or appeal to the wrong list. BGP communities for traffic engineering will not help here, but ensure your reverse DNS is properly de