email banning nightmare

[billbenson]

Things that can happen:

A shared server went down for two days on two sites that I use for my business emails.

They installed a new server and IP.

When things were up and running, my emails were and still are bounced, depending on the senders ISP. The bounce says I have been blacklisted. This happens from two different domains on that server. There three is an org that that maintains a database of spam IPs and the new IP that the new server used was in their blacklist.

I contacted my ISP and they have a security department that you can only contact by email. It was like trying to contact the CIA. I got an automated email back that said we may or may not be working on this and we may or may not do something about it.

After sending an email to my ISP security department, at 4 pm ish my emails started working for me at about midnight. The thing is, some of my customers continued to have emails being bounced. I assume this is because their ISP's had not removed the IP block from their database.

As of right now, I have no idea if all my customers can send me emails.

One of my business strategies has always been to get my email in my customers address book. That way, when they need something 6 months later, they may have my email. I've changed the email I used to a different server, and am cutting over to that, while leaving my old email in place. But I really have no way of knowing if this problem has been or is being resolved. Very frustrating.

[vangogh]

I had a similar problem with my email getting bounced, though for a different reason. The person who was behind the server where my site was hosted approved a spammer on the server who was sending out mass emails.

Everyone on the server was reported and my email was bouncing everywhere. We filled in the appropriate forms at as many ISPs as we could, but to this day some IPs still block some of my email.

My email client of choice is Thinderbird and the way I fixed things was to use my gmail account for outgoing mail. The only problem is gmail doesn't completely hide themselves in the process. My gmail account is a personal one so it wasn't something I really wanted to connect with my business.

Eventually it all sorted itself out as I'm on a new domain and a new server.

[degadar]

This is really common - Any ISP can find they get a customer on board who's spamming and get themselves on one or more blocking lists. It's part of the job. Unfortunately many service providers just don't care.

Blocking the source of an email is the only way an ISP can cut down the server load. If you take the spam in and then decide what to do with it you've already done half the work. So we use DNS based blocking lists and this is really effective.

Most reputable lists used in production only list single IP addresses and always have some right of appeal, but that's not always the case.

Other lists block entire chunks at once - so if your ISP uses the IP address range 212.13.123.1 to 212.13.123.128 they could possibly be blocked by the ISP 'next door' who has a spammer on 212.13.123.130

What I do is route email differently depending on its origin. Mail from UK sources and from my whitelist is handled much more 'politely' than mail from poland or china or israel. The whitelist senders are only checked against the safest dnsbl - and anything else gets the rubber glove treatment as it crosses the border.

[billbenson]

I suppose I could just get a dedicated IP for that site. A few bucks more, but a simple solution.

VG, I don't want to use Gmail, hotmail etc, because it doesn't look professional. It seems to be an IP block, not a domain block. Does anybody have any different info on what they are blocking?

[vangogh]

Bill the idea with using gmail was that it would still show your business email. The problem is that if someone knows how they can still see the gmail account by looking at the email headers. Most people aren't going to do that.

I think Graham is right about how things get blocked. Spam is such an issue that ISPs are more willing to have false positives than let spam get through.

In my case it was the mailserver that was banned. Not the mailserver on my domain, but the one behind it on the server which all the mail ultimately went through and which was visible to ISPs.

It's definitely not my area of expertise, but I think it's an easy subject to search and find. I'm sure there's a lot of info out there, though how good the info is I couldn't say.

If it's an IP block could you ask for a new IP that shows a different C block?