At one time quite recently, Cloudflare was on Spamhaus's "Don't Route Or Peer" list. Imagine where the world would be if anyone cared about that list.

But if an entire ISP is blocking you based on UCEPROTECT, which is designed for email spam filters - are you sure? An ISP that blocked all of DO would get so many complaints and be open to so much legal liability. Usually these are only used for email filtering.

However, there is nothing preventing function/scope creep of these blocklists into things they should not be. Political bias, censorship, morality policing will trickle into blocklists. Furthermore these false positives are quite onerous for legit businesses and customers who sincerely want to connect. I've connected again to an ad-blocking DNS service, and many people may subscribe to filtering services, or simply be involuntarily subscribed, in the hopes that their Internet would stay usable, and scam-free.

I suppose this is the price to pay in low-trust society (wild and wooly Internet). I wonder if the Great Firewall of China obviates the need for their citizens to throw up such protective measures.

I personally found Meteor in Ireland (previously owned by Orange) to be far more liberal with blocks on an unregistered mobile internet connection than other providers.

Also, Orange UK have a much stricter block list to enforce than, for example, Orange FR.

So, yes, if a service provider is known for having a lot of spam coming from it, it makes sense to be on there. They're not saying every IP is bad, they're literally stating the opposite (which seems fair).

So, if Orange are blocking purely based on it, not only are they using a spam filter as a DNS query/web filter (given uceprotect seems to flag based on mail spam traps based detections etc.) and ignoring their documentation (which says it shouldn't be used to block on it's own).

Uce level 3 should never be used alone to block general tcp traffic.

Are you saying that Orange is using uce level 3 to block email sent from your DO vm? Are you really sure that Orange blocks for this list only? Is it possible that your ip is on another RBL?

If Orange is really blocking smtp based only on uce level 3 they are doing wrong: their system may be mis-configured or they have not read correctly hiw level 3 is populated.

Or - probably - they did on pourpose!

Today I checked september smtp traffic: almost 99% of traffic coming from uce level 1 (single ips) was spam. Traffic hitting level 2 but not present in level 1 (subnets, one I checked was /15!!) was also 99% spam.

Of the 5000k messages received, very few arrived into the mailboxes. A lot of messages were blocked by following spam checks and the few remaining were flagged as spam.

I feel your pain. If you host on DO and you send email, you should look for a email provider that will funnel your emails.

Ps: i repeat, email shoild not be bloocked only by uce level 3

Check this...