Did you read the whole article? The OP wasn't being blacklisted by an operator. He was being blacklisted by a company that charges you a $25/month fee to not be blacklisted by lazy operators who program their systems to curl their for-profit blacklist.
People have been making legal threats at, and trying to sue, RBL operators since 1997 or so. It's a well known thing. All I say is "good luck" if you think legally threatening a maintainer of a list of IP CIDR prefixes that are used by a third party is going to solve your problems. It hasn't worked for the last 25 years and I don't see how it'll start working now.
No I think the solution is to not get a $5/month vps and expect it to have a good reputation. Maybe if you went with the $100/month hosting provider you wouldn't have needed to spend $500/month on legal threats. Internet addresses aren't fungible. It's a well known concept in telecommunications. One of the reasons why people have always paid a lot more money to have 212 numbers versus 646 numbers. It's the reason why if you want to set up a respectable business, you don't rent property in a high crime neighborhood. Browsers and email clients should ideally have more transparency about the ASNs and service providers who host the websites that people are visiting, so that everyone can develop a mental model of which ones are associated with good things, because right now the only people who are able to have any kind of awareness of this thing are operators who regularly monitor traffic.
This is completely valid, but if you go hunting for an IP block that has never been used for spam at this point you're going to be looking for a long time. It should not be the #1 consideration when choosing a hosting provider just because someone abused their IP block in the past (possibly before they even owned it). In any case, trying to run mail off a VPS would be stupid and that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we don't all need to capitulate to paying Amazon or Google to forward our outbound mail, and it would be better if we did not, even considering the struggles attached to bucking the trend.
