Why Are We on E-mail Blacklists?

LogicallyRogue asks: "I run an email server for a small webhosting company. We've crawled all around the email server to make it as secure as possible: tightened Sendmail's security, POP Before SMTP, denying non-authenticated relaying, using SpamCop DNS blacklist, etc. However, with all this in place, every few months, it seems that we have been blacklisted by some ISP somewhere. This month it was AOL. We had no warning, and we don't know why we were blacklisted. All the information we have is a single URL. We visit all the DNS blacklist services we can to be sure we are not on any of them. We send emails to the postmasters inquiring for more information (like perhaps a reason or copy of the email that made the ISP blacklist us) - however, those are usually bounced back because we are blacklisted. We've tried calling the Blacklisting ISP tech support - and usually get the stunned I-have-no-clue-what-you-are-talking-about silence. Have any other Slashdot readers experienced similar problems with blacklisting and the big ISPs?"

Comments

In other news . . .

[dheltzel]

AOL announced today that they have corrected the "issue" with their mail servers rejecting email from IP's starting with 6. Currently email is being rejected from servers with IP's starting with 7. AOL will be publishing a schedule shortly at to when each range of IP's will have it's emails rejected.

When asked why the company is implementing this policy, Bob Harvey, AOL's Minister of Information, said that they had determined that 70% of the emails coming from those IP's was Spam, and the remaining 30% didn't look very important to him anyway.

Re:Dial-up or residential IP blocks, too

[slittle]

if someone not on your network can connect to port 25 on your server, then you're an open relay

iptables -I INPUT 1 -J REJECT -p tcp --dport 25

Wow, they're right! I'm completely spam free now!

Onion statshot

[jbert]

Did this remind anyone else of the onion 'statshot' feature.

Top-ten reasons: Why are we on e-mail blacklists?

1 - Poor social skills cause instant dislike in anyone we communicate with

2 - Cursed by bequest of Nigerian Uncle's Viagra stockpile

3 - Was unaware that neighbours were advertising us as "live nerd-cam!"

4 - this is slashdot?????

5 - profit!

New! AOL 8.0 Rejecting Addresses Beginning with 8!

[sulli]

You haven't got mail!

So easy to use, no wonder it's #1!

Re:overzealous spam lists

[coed.jpg]

It's so simple... I just can't see why it hasn't been implemented.