My company has recently enabled the content filtering on a Sonicwall firewall, and we have been less than impressed.

It categorized my personal domain, www.matthewmiller.net as "Pornography" as well as the web-mail interface for said site. Because of the category it picked, our webmaster is unable to add the site to our white list. They've also blacklisted portions of our Financial CE sites as "Pornography."


This means I am no longer able to use the webmail interface for testing code that sends e-mail to clients.

I'm more than a little miffed at this turn of events, and very frustrated that Sonicwall.com does not seem to have any resources for reporting an improperly blocked URL.

I tried to look up some more details on this problem, and have found a few Sonicwall critical sites listed as "Adult/Mature" or "Pornography." It wouldn't be the first time I'd heard of a site being blocked by a filter because it was critical of that filter. I find myself wondering what else Sonicwall blocks, and what their criteria is for black listing sites.

My personal domain is not on any of the Real Time black holes, and I'm not aware of any content on the site that could be considered pornographic. There really isn't much I can do about it at this point. Our network admin has submitted a support request to Sonicwall, and we're waiting to hear back.

It's very frustrating to have been branded a certain way for my content, yet have no recourse for resolving the issue.

I'm asking everyone and anyone who has had their site unfairly blocked by Sonicwall's content filters to post here, telling the URL of their site and why they feel the site shouldn't be blocked.

EDIT: The following comments were posted to this entry on my old, defunct MT Blog:

2005-09-03 16:56:25
Nolon
Panera bread is using this crap. Blocked Fark.com. It's idiotic. As well all know if you can't look at porn Fark lets you know.

2005-08-11 16:51:39
Big Dirty
bigdirty.blog-city.com
It's completely irrelevant to anything, yet it was blocked as "pornography"

2004-07-13 23:21:59
Michael Droste
http://www.trumpetlessons.com
my site has also been blocked trumpetlessons.com! I also emailed sonicwall and have NOT received a response.