Slashdot Mirror
Verizon's Aggressive New Spam Filter Causing Problems
aviancarrier writes "Verizon DSL has turned on a very aggressive spam filter that is blocking lots of long-time legitimate emails. Emails get bounced with an error: 'XX@verizon.net: host relay.verizon.net[206.46.232.11] said: 550 Email from your Email Service Provider is currently blocked by Verizon Online's anti-spam system. The email "sender" or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block.' That whitelist web page lets you request one address at a time to be whitelisted with no guarantee for their response time to process it. I have tested multiple email sources and only one got through. As a VZ customer, I just spent 28 minutes on a call to tech support, eventually got a supervisor who knows nothing about the new spam feature, and would only agree to email a manager who doesn't work weekends about it. I warned her that VZ has a public relations problem but she was too clueless to understand." Many users have submitted this problem so it seems to be a pretty far reaching problem. There is also a discussion going on over at Google about this problem.
Bookmark this page. It will be your best friend.
This guy's the limit!
A large number of mail providers arbitrarily block any mail originating from net blocks identified as being used by "consumer" ISP's for dynamically assigned IP addresses. It's kind of lame, but also very effective at stopping large amounts of spam. Use your ISP's mail server as a smart host, or (if you don't trust the clue level of your ISP) one of the many SMTP relay services out there, I believe DynDns does one.
More and more ISPs are starting to implement the same compliance checks. Would any of these reject your system's mail? Several of our customers had misconfigured outbound servers and we helped them fix their systems. We were only early adopters, though; if we hadn't caught the problem then a major ISP or five would have started rejecting their email without being so helpful.
Maybe VZ is in the right this time. Are you sure they're not?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As a Verizon DSL custmoer, I can attest to there being a problem. For the past 18 months, Verizon has refused to pass along listserv messages forward to my verizon.net inbox from my university email account. Emails from individuals that are addressed to my univeristy made it through the spam filters fine. But emails from my university's listserver were blocked. All of them.
... Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable. Whitelisting will not help. They will need to correct the config on their mail server." This made no sense to me, to my school's IT department, and even to the Verizon tech who tried to interpret the notes. Apparently, what these notes meant to say was the university's servers did not comply with some sort of internet standards for mail routing. Despite there being a legitimate use for the messages, Verizon would not create an exception in the hallowed standard to accomodate the forwarded messages. Verizon's OSC recommended that I tell my school's IT department that it was their servers that did not comply with the standard -- that if they wanted Verizon to accept their forwards, they needed to reconfigure their listservers. This was incredible. For what it was worth, I relayed this to my school's IT department. Not surprizingly, they have made no changes. Why fix what works with 99.9% of the ISPs out there? Whoever said Verizon was using brute force tactics to do business has hit the nail right on the head.
I called Verizon about it in January after I realized it was happening. I suspected it had been going on since I got my DSL service, but at the time just assumed that I had been unsubscribed from all of my school's listservs (because of some crazy mix up regarding my academic year, my switch from an undergrad to a law student, etc. Don't ask...). Verizon opened an Operation Control Services (OSC) ticket to look into the matter. After four months of investigating, dozens of calls, hours of talking to tech no-support, and five OSC tickets later, the matter still is not resolved.
During the time we were diagnosing the problem, OSC asked for the error code that my university received whenever it tried to forward messages. My college's IT department told me that they received an error 450 for every message: "Deferred: 450 Requested mail action not taken-Try later:sv11pub.verizon.net (from relay.verizon.net [206.46.232.11])." According to OSC, this meant that the Verizon mail server could not verify that the listserv messages being forwarded actually originated from the listserver domain. Given my school's list server set up, this makes perfect sense; users on the listserv may send an email to the server's listening account, which takes messages and creates a new message to blast the original message to all the listserv's recipients. The intermediate listening account seemed to be a legitimate way to relay messages to recipients.
Apparently, that didn't fly with the Verizon servers. OSC engineers thoroughly explained the problem in my account's notes, "Sender cannot be verified, which is the cause of their mail issue. NOTE: 451
But this is not the only problem at Verizon. One month ago, they had to suspend their entire "Block Senders" database because it got so large that the Verizon server couldn't process the messages through it. As I understand it, the database caused a number of hiccups, blocking hundreds of legitimate messages and letting through as many or more spam messages. To this day, Verizon has not reintstated users' "block senders" email option.
This is not to mention the fact that Verizon is notorious for not following up with its customers. Over the four months that I tried to get a resolution, only once did I ever receive a call from a member of the supervisor escalation group, informing me of any "progress." In an effort to keep myself in the loop, I would call the verizon tech no-support department, only to find that that my OSC ticket had been closed without notice and without resolu