Frequently Asked Questions
1. Introduction
SpamVerify is a ip abuse reporting platform that helps webmasters, system administrators, and cybersecurity professionals monitor, detect, report, and block malicious IP addresses.
We provide free access to both our website platform and API for reporting malicious IP addresses detected on your systems, checking ip addresses reported for malicious activity or keeping your firewalls updated with our blacklist.
We consider any illegal, abusive or inappropriate activity detected from an IP address, Domain or Email address to be malicious such as Spam, DDoS, Hacking, Spoofing or Phishing.
SpamVerify operates on a credit-based system that rewards community participation allowing free access to our system and API.
Every account is provided with 5,000 credits per day to use our API. As you contribute more reports, you'll advance through our tier system, unlocking better rates and higher daily limits.
If you would like to know more about Credits, view our credits page. Our API Documentation can be found on our api documentation page
2. Reports & Moderation
Our Threat score is scaled from 0-100 on how confident we are based on user reports.
A score of 0 means we have no reason to suspect it is malicious currently but a score of 100 means we are sure the IP address is malicious.
The score system is a very conservative value and is based on user reports, age of reports, SpamVerify honeypots and slight weighting based on the reporters tiers.
The scores decay over time to ensure we are providing a blacklist/blocklist that's relevant to the current time.
The score system has its own algorithm to ensure reports are condemned at strong reliability and not one reporter can overpower the rating.
SpamVerify's goal is to keep the internet a safer place, but this is only achieved by everyone working together.
Part of the goal of a community driven reporting and blacklist platform is ensuring no bad-actors use SpamVerify to report ip addresses for the wrong reasons.
Each user is given a tier based on our credits system, learn more here. Lower tiers reports initially enter a separate reporting queue for our Moderation team to review. Once a user is monitored and confirmed safe they are placed into the main reporting queue.
Our Moderation team also have internal tools to spot check reports for users on all tiers and some tools use AI to flag reports to be reviewed by Moderators.
We have a large amount of internal tools our moderation team can use and our task is to constantly develop systems that improve the reporting quality.
3. API & Limitations
We provide a free API for checking and reporting malicious ip addresses.
If you are a webmaster or system admin looking to automate reporting malicious ip addresses or syncing our blacklist we recommend you use our fail2ban integration.
To use our API, you have to register an account
SpamVerify has no limitations on our API endpoints for checking addresses or blacklists however will use our credits system, learn more about credits here.
Due to the amount of resources need to operate SpamVerify each user tier has specific daily-limits on the number of reports they can submit from 5,000 per day to 25,000 per day.
The Website has no limitations or restrictions nor does it use any form of credits.
If an IP Address is continuously engaging in abuse on your systems, we ask you to only report the same IP address once per day.
To prevent our threat scoring system from being overpowered or reports duplicated we limit each account to report the same IP address once every 20 minutes.
If a user reports the same IP address and comment in the same 24 hour window, the existing reports timestamp will be updated rather than creating a new report.
4. Support
SpamVerify is a service provided to all free of charge with support from our community and sponsors. You can support us by making a donation.
Money isn't the only way to support us, we are always looking for skilled developers to help us build a repository of code for all languages that helps users report and check IPs automatically.
If you have written your own custom scripts to integrate with SpamVerify and are happy to share your code to the community, contact us.
If you have donated to us, build scripts for the community or linked to us on your website - contact us for the "Supporter" badge and a free higher tier upgrade.
If you are a company who can provide SpamVerify with tools to keep the world a safer place, please get in touch!