Spamhaus Draws a November Line as Cold Email Drives a Record 1.15M Listings

Masthead deck. Starting next month, Spamhaus will require a valid HELO, a reverse DNS record and a matching A record for every sending IP, enforced gradually over several months, and its own domain report puts cold email at the centre of a record 1.15 million listings in September. The deadline is now the loudest argument in practitioner channels, where a domain vendor spent Sunday dropping .info from its buying list and a 43,000-follower creator reported her newsletter in spam on its third domain.

Edition window: 2026-10-25 06:24 UTC to 2026-10-26 06:24 UTC. Every item below carries a UTC timestamp inside that window unless explicitly labelled as background attached to an in-window post.

At a glance

• A DNS deadline lands in days, not quarters. Spamhaus published its Sender Guidelines on 21 October and says enforcement of basic DNS requirements begins in November 2026, rolled out over several months: valid HELO, PTR record, matching A record, for every sending IP Spamhaus, 21 Oct. The in-window explainer that carried it to practitioners drew 3,531 views X, 25 Oct 09:40 UTC.
• The blocklist's own numbers now indict outbound. Spamhaus counted 3.37 million malicious or suspicious domain listings, up 56.6%, and 1.15 million in September alone, a record month its own announcement attributed to cold email domains X, 15 Oct.
• The cure is not technical compliance alone, and the forum proved it. A verified creator on her third domain and third address says her Kit newsletter still lands in spam with SPF, DKIM and DMARC all passing X, 25 Oct 13:30 UTC. The one substantive email thread on Reddit in the window was a gambling sender told that warmup tools will not save him Reddit, 25 Oct 14:24 UTC.
• The production side of the job collapsed to minutes. An ecommerce operator reported building 32 abandoned-cart emails in under ten minutes with Claude Code, Omnisend, Nano Banana and FFmpeg, inside a Black Friday flow of roughly 50 emails segmented by currency X, 25 Oct 13:55 UTC.