Do you know what the lawyers said beyond "I'm a lawyer and would like you to edit the blacklist" ? Are these companies doing something illegal by blacklisting you unfairly, or do you have grounds for some sort of civil suit (if so, what grounds)?
"Tortious interference is a common law tort allowing a claim for damages against a defendant who wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff's contractual or business relationships"
A blacklist is not directly interfering with your business. They just provide a list that contains IPs, your IP, and say we have seen spam traffic from it in the last x hours. The mail receiver, who trusts and uses the list might be interfering, but it is his right to pick and choose who he is accepting email from. Same right you have to pick and choose who you let into your bar, apartment, club, house, ... what so ever.
Safe your 500 bucks per hour. A lawyer will not do anything
But I do know the "enemy" of my "enemy" is not necessarily my "friend".
I've seen the nightmare of the next Internet. Whether it's micropayments for digital stamps, or slowly refilling quotas, or hard hierarchical controls, it's more power to central authority.
I know I'll never win this argument.
The Internet will keep fracturing and normal citizens will get more frustrated. There will be a change. But just like the hatred of social media, lurking underneath it is an insatiable thirst for power.
I'm not saying this situation is _good_. It results in massive consolidation and gatekeeping by Tier 1s for mail. The problem is that it's much easier to send mail over SMTP than receive it, so the cost is on the receiver to filter mail. That means the receiver has every incentive to be overly defensive. I think a hashcash/PoW mechanism or a cryptocurrency deposit mechanism could be a great way to fight some of these problems. Pay a crypto deposit and receive a tunnel to send mail through. If you violate any spam policies, your deposit is lost and the tunnel is closed. Or charge cryptocurrency (quadratically?) per mail sent on this tunnel.
TOS are gonna TOS, but if the small print reserves the right to block spam, or traffic from spammers, then proof of not being a spammer, or at least proof of a legitimate use, might create an obligation ATT has to its users to not block those addresses, even if there's no obligation to the 3rd party making the request.
The knowledge affects ATT's obligations to others, not the requestor.
Idk where that gets you in a practical sense, but its at least a line of reasoning that's beyond "ATT can block whatever it wants".
That’s what tortuous interference is, getting in the way of third parties doing business. You could argue about technical details around the server but a judge will properly understand the social constructs at play.