I can't look today but I will tomorrow - I did test all this a long while ago when fixing the whitelist.
"I do not believe you are $host"
Don't conflate things. You are going down rabbit holes here. You really need to read each plugin, see when it is used and the messages it throws.
I think this an error from whitelist helo plugin which is detecting a bad helo name. Not part of the black
list check. You can affect this with the whitelisthelo setting.
Note. The blacklist IP format does not use *
If you read the code in the plugin you will see it checks for a couple of things as I have mentioned. Read the errors & grep match them to the plugin files.
The code looks for an IP indicated by an @ symbol.
This bit below.
return 1 if $bad eq "\@$host";
So far I don't see an error.
The only thing that possibly could be modified is the better help and syntax checking in the panel, but IIRC syntax checking is tricky.