I just got off the phone with Barracuda, makers of an incredibly popular line of corporate firewall / proxy / spam filter appliances. After weeks of emailing into a black hole from whence no replies emerge, I’ve finally confirmed what many Engadget readers have been reporting for the last couple of months: somehow Barracuda added Engadget (namely, our backend / hosting facilities at www.blogsmithmedia.com) to their blacklist as spam. Not inappropriate (read: time-wasting) content… spam.

Before I started on this minor investigation my old sysadmin genes started kicking in. I checked out a few of the usual spam blacklist services (like Spamhaus and ROKSO, SpamCop, etc.), but it was obvious this wasn’t going to help. Our blogsmithmedia services are edge-hosted, meaning the IP you’ll get could change depending on your location. In other words, someone at Barracuda manually added www.blogsmithmedia.com — which hosts all media on Engadget, Weblogs, Inc., TMZ, etc. — to the spam list. Way to go Barracuda. Apparently a product engineer is now officially on the case, so hopefully we’ll have some resolution on this shortly the next time they roll out an update to their spam blacklist. (Any Barracuda admins know how often those go out?)

To all our Barracuda-burdened readers: sorry! We couldn’t really help this, but thanks for standing by during those long, Engadget-free hours at work. Big ups to Keith for helping kick-start this thing.