Ooof
Ive changed nothing and now its correctly marked a spam email
HOSTKARMA-BLACK: 10
At my wits end, have been troubleshooting issue with Antispam RBL/URIBLs for the last week or so and have not pinpointed with a degree of certainty what is going on.
This may have to do with me using OVH DNS servers ...

https://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/103.118.246.147.html
and here is the scoring as per Smartermail

SPAMHAUS_SBL_SBL-CSS_DROP (MYDQSKEY.sbl.dq.spamhaus.net): 0 - LISTED
HOSTKARMA_BLACK (hostkarma.junkemailfilter.com): 0 - LISTED
HOSTKARMA_BROWN (hostkarma.junkemailfilter.com): 0 - LISTED
HOSTKARMA_URIBL (hostkarma.junkemailfilter.com): 0 - LISTED
MAILSPIKE-L4_MAILSPIKE-L5 (rep.mailspike.net): 0 - LISTED
UCEPROTECT-3 (dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net): 0 - LISTED
UCEPROTECT-2 (dnsbl-2.uceprotect.net): 0 - LISTED
SPAMHAUS_DBL (MYDQSKEY.dbl.dq.spamhaus.net): 4 - LISTED

SPAMHAUS_ZRD (MYDQSKEY.zrd.dq.spamhaus.net): 0
SPAMHAUS_AUTHBL (MYDQSKEY.authbl.dq.spamhaus.net): 0
SPAMHAUS_PBL (MYDQSKEY.pbl.dq.spamhaus.net): 0
SPAMHAUS_XBL (MYDQSKEY.xbl.dq.spamhaus.net): 0
SPAMHAUS_HBL (MYDQSKEY.hbl.dq.spamhaus.net): 0
SEM_BL (bl.spameatingmonkey.net): 0
SEM_BS (backscatter.spameatingmonkey.net): 0
GBUDB (truncate.gbudb.net): 0SURRIEL (psbl.surriel.com): 0
MAILSPIKE-L1_MAILSPIKE-L2_MAILSPIKE-L3 (net.mailspike.net): 0
UCEPROTECT-1 (dnsbl-1.uceprotect.net): 0
BACKSCATTER (ips.backscatterer.org): 0
BARRACUDA (b.barracudacentral.org): 0
UBL (ubl.unsubscore.com): 0
SPAMCOP (bl.spamcop.net): 0
IX (ix.dnsbl.manitu.net): 0
URIBL_RED (red.uribl.com): 0
URIBL_GREY (grey.uribl.com): 0
URIBL_BLACK (black.uribl.com): 0
SEM_URIRED (urired.spameatingmonkey.net): 0
SEM_URIBL (uribl.spameatingmonkey.net): 0
SURBL (multi.surbl.org): 0

And yes, I have also tried added SPAMHAUS into less queries and it made no difference.

Unrelated but I think that ix service is dead https://nixspam.net/

Thanks will remove that.
Am trying out Quad9 DNS as I think OVH (I have a bare metal server) may be filtering/restricting the DNS requests (the mail server handles less than 3k daily). But this has not had any effect i.e. RBL/URIBL scoring is still hit/miss.

Other than setting up a DNS server to handle these requests im out of ideas as what is the cause.

We are on 100.0.9575.20827 (20/03/2026) that I have held off updating to the latest version as those versions cannot be rolled back....

Please review this post.  You definitely do not want to be using Quad9 for RBL checking, because it is a DNS filter.  You probably do not want to be using any DNS forwarder, because the RBL database is not expected to be included in zone transfers.

Thank you for that info Douglas, I turned to an LLM to seek "assistance" as there was very little feedback to my intial posts. Once I prompted the LLM (Claude, Sonnet 4.6) with the info you gave me as per usual it instantly back tracked on its "advice" :\

DNS timeouts is what I had come to the main reason the issues im seeing. Looks like I am going to have to setup a DNS server just for handling RBLs/URIBLs ..

So yesterday evening I setup Unbound on the same server that Smartermail is installed on (these are the resources I have available at this moment in time). I unchecked the DNS-SEC tick box as so not to use that and the results are much more consistent across all RBLs/URIBLs I have setup. So far ive spotted one SPAMHAUS flagged email not scoring correctly.

 

It’s good advice to use your own dns server. I also use unbound. I use rspamd as well and have them on the same Linux server that also acts as outbound SM gateway.