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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.
I went to the referenced URL and it sure looks to me like, using the
ISP form, you can request multiple domains and multiple IP addrs in a
single request.
Also, the discussion over at Google currently has a whopping 6 entries.
Much ado about nothing?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Are we really entering an era where the only way to filter mail is to simply block incoming traffic so aggresively that we don't even get our mail? There does not seem to be much chance of filtering those hundreds of messages a day we get and still get the few we need. Viva la advertising!
Here's a trick for Verizon Online phone service: Call up, listen to menu items, then say -nothing-. Don't ask for an operator, don't enter in your phone number: just chill for about two minutes while the prompts repeat. In under three minutes, you'll be transfered to a live operator.
So, looks like they're blocking almost every email to eliminate spam. heh, How long till they do this with Telemarketers too?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
...you need to power-cycle your DSL modem, disconnect everything but a single ethernet cable from your modem to your PC, reboot your PC, count to 30 while hopping on one foot, and say the alphabet backwards first before anyone at Verizon will turn on their brains and acknowledge they have a problem. Plus...28 minutes on the phone?? Pffft. You don't get the "real" tech support until they keep you on the line for at least 60 minutes.
Don't you know how they troubleshoot already?
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
I ran a bulk-sending system (legitimate!) to email Frontier Airline's frequent flyer members, and Verizon was the biggest single problem getting mail through. I don't think I ever did get them to accept our runs at all.
The big thing they already had in place was that they want to connect back on port 25 to the sending system AND make sure it responds initially with the same name it's using to send mail out. Not a bad thing overall, I suppose, but I can see how it would block quite a few messages from providers that use separate sending servers from their receiving servers. I finally had to set up SMTPFWDD on both outgoing servers to accept connections and silently drop any emails they get, that helped, but I think they still rate-limited heavily.
I'd say if you depend on getting your email, Verizon's not a good ISP to use.
How about the holy-crap-thank-you-for-the-whole-error-message-wh ere-is-the-stack-trace department?
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
Verizon is a spam sewer itself.
r izon.net
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ve
Having worked in tech support for a large company, I can assure you that the position of supervisor for a tech support call centre really doesn't have nearly as much influence on coprorate public relations as you seem to think that it has.
Most of the people in her position would be surprised to find out that any one from the head office even knows that they exist, let alone cares about what they do or asks their opinion on issues like PR. It's normal to be annoyed when a company like Verizon screws up like this, but lashing out at the tech support staff just because they're the easist people to reach really doesn't help anybody.
Attempts to contact Verizon to verify claims have been met with resistance.
This sytem from Verizon is a step in the right direction. AT&T's spam blocking is totally lame, wish they would learn a thing or two from their competitors. I do admin my own domains but keep my at&t for special purposes. It is possible to filter over 99% of spam through a combination of techniques.
Something like this had to happen sooner or later. I have my Hotmail account's junk filters set to exclusive (address book only) and I still get junk in my inbox.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Sometime this morning two of my email addresses got whitelisted and could get through again to Verizon Online. Earlier in the morning I received form emails from Verizon's whitelist group saying they have attempted to contact the blocked company/domain.
Regarding the person who accused me of being a spammer: No. Just a husband trying to email my wife's VZ account.
Regarding the "lashing" out at the customer service supervisor: I was trying to get her to help her own company out. The fact that she was not told anything about a new level of spam filtering nor had (she claims) a way to contact a manager on a weekend about a PR problem may be a standard problem for that level of supervisor, but I wanted to give her a way to be a hero internally and stop a PR problem from getting worse.
I been noticing that lately with AT&T (previously SBC) DSL where recruiter emails are landing in the spam box. Makes me wonder if I should respond to these emails if they can't get by a spam filter. Fortunately, nearly all of them are jobs that I wouldn't consider anyway.
Emails to Verizon to find out more information have gone unanswered...
This guy's the limit!
That page is pretty interesting. Especially the gethuman database
:(){
Seems like it.
I used to send all my email out of my own mailserver, out of my home firewall/router/"box-in-a-closet" machine.
Recently -- like within the last six months or so, I've noticed an alarming number of domains that aren't receiving my emails. And no, I haven't been blackholed or otherwise put on anyone's shit list, nor am I running an open relay. The mailserver is perfectly well-behaved, standards compliant, and only relays from within my home LAN.
I also don't mass-mail or do any other sort of sketchy activity, I just always liked having my own mailserver and never having to worry about when my ISPs (or Google's, or my web hosting providers') was going to flake out on me. But it's becoming nearly impractical to do. I'm never sure if an email that I sent out has actually gotten through, or if it's just been silently eaten by some spam filter somewhere.
The worst offender that I've found so far is Comcast; I haven't been able to get any messages through at all to Comcast subscribers, and they don't provide back any sort of acknowledgment that a message has been blocked. Every time I send anything to them, it's firing a shot into the darkness.
I hate spam as much as anybody else (probably more than some); I'm in favor of using some of those Federal "computer crimes" laws -- the ones that have harsher penalties for electronically violating a system than if you walked in and stole it in person -- against spammers. See what 20 years of pound-me-in-the-ass prison followed by another 10 or 15 of no-computer probation (and consequent unemployment) does for their attitude. Or there are the always popular vigilante death squads, I could find a warm place in my heart for them, too. Either of those would be preferable to the current patchwork system of blacklists, whitelists, greylists, RBLs, and unilateral policies on the part of ISPs that break up the nature of the network.
Sending an email shouldn't be like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, but that's how it's getting to be with some ISPs.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...is that Comcast is the alternative (that I know of).
I remember one day the phone line went down. Pfft. Zzt. Nothing. No dialtone, no incoming, and of course no DSL. Called Verizon Support and got level 1'd for two hours. "Did you check the test line?". You fucking robot, did I not just say that three seperate lines, plus the DSL, were all out, and yes I have unplugged each and every phone in every possible combination? The test line isn't going to tell me anything I don't already know.
Anyway, three days later (can't get an engineer on a weekend, no siree bobsiree) some guy shows up and fixes the issue. Aside from that, and the usual LinkSys router + DSL modem teething troubles, Verizon's been okay, though hardly optimal.
At least Comcast could get a greasemonkey out here in 24 hours to wiggle the wires and shrug in perplexion, since everything "seemed fine" at the moment. Of course, who cares if the service is quick when the shit's down at least two hours per week? And don't get me started on the cable TV.
Anyone know of any good, reliable, cheap, non-firewalled broadband in the DC Metro area?
Heh.. just wait until they start changing the playing field on you.. advertise the next great phone (which is 7 generations in technology behind every other carrier) with 100 brand new features, then deliver 20 of those 100 features promising the rest will be enabled in a firmware release, which never comes..
Just wait until you have service problems with your cell phone, and it takes 2 hours on hold to get ahold of someone who can barely speak english, and is clearly reading off a script and does nothing to fix your problem.
Just wait until Verizon is the only DSL/broadband choice in your area, and it takes them 4 weeks, yes, 4 weeks to flip the switch to turn on your DSL.. Had the modem plugged in for that long, and they just took their sweet little old time to turn it on..
Just wait until your land line mysteriously goes out, and it takes them 2 weeks to send someone out to fix it.
Oh, and how about the old "this slip is pink, so you must have dunked your cell phone in the water" trick.. I hold up a piece of paper to the sticker, and it is as white as the white piece of paper..
Verizon- we never stop working for you (well, unless it isn't within our profit margins, or it will require us to have a competent employee do some work).
So if these hosts are so spammy, why don't these filters block the outgoing mail being sent to these hosts??
The issue of these spam filters and blacklists come up all the time. The one question I don't see being asked (let alone answered) is why these companies don't also bounce back the outgoing mail that their clients send? Perhaps because that would lead to lots and lots of complaints?
If the filters are good enough to block incomming mail, they should also be good enough to block the outgoing mail.
Just a quick note, I run an email service, and I've had the most problems getting past blocks from:
AOL
Excite
Comcast
The easiest was AOL, they have a number you can call 24 hours a day to get removed (but it takes 48 hours for the removal to take effect). The other two have been blocking mail from my servers for two weeks. I have filled out contact forms, and left voicemails to no avail.
I haven't recieved a complaint about Verizon yet, but that could be because I have SPF records.
agreed!! Its part of the deal when you sign up, so obv you ARE paying for it.
Unfortunately, email spam fighting is always more work than you'll ever have resources available for, and it'll never be 100%.
Even if you let users manage it, about 60% of them won't have a clue, they'll bollocks it up for themselves, and they won't be able to distinguish between your web appliance and the OEM Norton Antispam which continually misconfigures itself again and again.
I wonder if we should just ban email altogether so that we can actually get some other work done.
do() || do_not();
This is ironic considering Verizon is one of the major SOURCES of spam. We've ended up wholesale RBL'ing most of their DUL space. Here's a good Sendmail-based blacklist to start with.
Generally speaking, I think it's a good idea to implement something like this, but the problem with Verizon is that they need to filter port 25 on their broadband IP space first and foremost, like AOL and Bellsouth and many other providers are starting to do.
Ultimately, what Verizon is doing is not a bad thing. It will force other ISPs to more closely police the illegal traffic on their networks from zombie PCs, but it's ironic that Verizon isn't controlling their own zombie PC traffic before blocking other ISPs SMTP packets.
Perhaps she was too jaded from hearing customers complain that Verizon has a PR problem.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
From what I've heard (and what I experienced from having their service in the second half of 2000), this is nothing new for Verizon. They're only interested in the money-making aspects of the telecom business, and drag their feet on everything else. The setup of this aggressive new spam filter was probably one of those "money-making" items, since it means far less spam traffic and decreased accusations of hosting spam bots. Of course, when customers start complaining that they can't send email to specific addresses, they have to deal with Verizon's understaffed, undercapable customer service departments, who will most likely be faced with fierce opposition from the suits in opposing the "grand money-saving, liability-reducing spam filter".
Also, keep in mind that when Verizon acquired MCI, they acquired UUNet, a tier-1 ISP with some serious spam problems of their own. I wouldn't be surprised if taking on UUNet's elephant-on-their-back was part of the rationale behind the new spam filtering policies.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This is a major PR issue! I'm sure if you contact them, the New York Times will run a front page article about the lack of a guaranteed response time for Verizon's whitelisting service. That is, unless anything else at all happens on the planet today.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
It's a track from his Scary Monsters album, not a line of DVD's promising 'barely legal' actresses!
Shame...
--
onedotzero
thedigitalfeed.co.uk
Oh wow, now I see they are also hosting mailing lists as "groups" as well. Way to muddle the terminology; I guess that is the point. I hate marketing/advertising people.
As always, in such things I may be mistaken, or the condition may be transient, but I no longer seem to be able to access their web-based email with Firefox for Windows 1.0. It used to work perfectly. Of course, IE works...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
That sounds suspiciously like "you paid for a running car, not a working horn or radio." If they advertise a service bundle, they need to deliver.
Your DIY/hire a craftsman approach to this problem is certainly one way to handle it, but the average user has a right to expect the entire purchased service bundle to work.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
Saying a phone line tech support manager is bad at her job because she can't do anything about an engineering 'feature' in under two days is impossibly naive.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Why is Verizon blocking any of it's customers' mail by default and then putting the onus on them to fix any problems that arise in the first place? This should be an opt-in service for those who want to make sure they don't miss anything.
SPEWS is a good example of idiotic spam filtering. They list my site as a spammer because I hosted DNS for a netblock that was grabbed and abused by a spammer. I spent some time on Use(less)Net trying to correct the situation, and was met with suspicion, paranoia, and abuse.
There's only one place that my site regularly exchanges email with that uses SPEWS, and I know exactly who to talk to for the fix. The problem is, it keeps on happening every couple of months. What a Pain in the Ass.
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?
Here is a list of some of the most troublesome Verizon DUL IP space that spam activity is coming from. You can block port 25 traffic on these class B and Cs since they don't control their own users' zombie PC spamming:
64.222.104 68.160 68.161.156
68.162 68.163 70.16
70.17 70.18 70.18.155
70.18.11 70.19 70.20
70.21 70.22 70.23
70.104 70.105 70.106
Please excuse the weird format here but the junk filter on SC is annoying.
70.107 70.108 71.100
71.101 71.103 71.104
71.105 71.114 71.116
71.117 71.118 71.119
71.123 71.124 71.125
71.127 71.162 71.241
It would be nice to line these all up cleanly but it's not possible with the way things are filtered on message submissions.
71.242 71.243 71.244
71.247 71.251 71.252
71.253 71.254 72.65
129.44.9 138.88 141.149
141.150 141.151 141.152
141.153 141.156 141.157
141.158 151.199 151.200
162.83 162.84
Most of the IP space above are DUL/broadband that includes tons of zombie PCs. There should be very little (if any) legitimate SMTP traffic coming from these IP blocks, yet there is, and it's all spam and worm activity.
I know I am costing everyone money for me to have a little sick satisfaction, but it helps keep my spirits up when I am on hold for billing/tech support.
Verizon Wireless has almost nothing in common with Verizon "The Phone Company."
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
This actually sounds like one of the most useful features for an ISP I've ever really heard of. What ISP do you use?
i dont know if its just me but i could never sign up with Verizon due to its highly annoying name.
They probably spent thousands on ad people to come up with it.
[annoying ad guy #1:] We need a name which "encapsulates the broadband generation", something with "reach" and "go ahead qualities" which says "hey, we're here and going places! but we couldnt gave a rat's ass about you customers"
[annoying ad guy #2:] hmmmmm, yeah it need something distant, but not too distant on the wave...or horizon.....horizon!!
[annoying ad guy #1:] yeah horizion! Great just what we're looking for....but its missing *IT*
[annoying ad guy #1:] yeah it defiantly needs *it*....
[annoying ad guy #2:] yeah....*it*....something on the horizon but its closer.....not unattainable yet still special with pazazz..
[annoying ad guy #1:] Nearizon..hmmm....Hereizon....!! I GOT IT!
[annoying ad guy #1:] this is going to be great......HQ will just love it!
[annoying ad guy #1:] get this VERIZON!!
[annoying ad guy #2:] get this VERIZON!!
[annoying ad guy #2:] annoying ad guy #1 you are totally the best! Wow that defiantly has *it*!
[annoying ad guy #1:] >>false modesty mode>pointed gun finger gesture
SPAM filters are REAAAAAALLY annoying to me as a Sidekick user. The email servers are actually handed by Danger Inc, and I'm not sure exactly how it works but I think they're relayed through TMobile's servers or some other such weirdness so we can have a @tmail.com on our emails instead of @danger.com.
Problem is several ISPs block all emails from these devices. "Relaying Prohibited" or something like that. The one I know for certain is Mindspring, but strangely Earthlink emails get through just fine. I guess it's the goal of SPAMMERS to be so twisty and hard to identify that eventually all sorts of legitimate email gets filtered by mistake, at that point they'll simply have to stop blocking it.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
...that I no longer work for the VZ mail team. And I can say, without a doubt that I'm VERY happy that I don't sit next to the Spam Cop... I know he reads /. and he would be VERY pissy for the next week or so.
I may be burried in work, but at least I'm not burried in public ire.
speaking of which, does anyone know how to get bandwith and bandwith only at a lower price than will all the extra crap? (I'm in SBC territory)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Verio is doing it too. Not long ago, I sent e-mail to a friend about a dirty joke I'd heard. It got rejected by Verio's SMTP server. (Not bounced; Mozilla displayed a dialog indicating the server refused to send it, with the only the status "Denied" given as the reason.)
I tried resending several times. I restarted Mozilla. I typed the password very carefully. It would not send.
Then I took out the dirty words and left the rest of the message, and it went through on the first try.
I'm not a child, and I don't appreciate being censored when I speak to other adults.
If there were any parts of my e-mail in all-caps, or if I mentioned mortgage rates or penis growth or cheap Xanax, I might be sympathetic. But I did none of those things. I haven't sent anything to more than two or three recipients in years. This e-mail went to one recipient. And I seriously doubt my Linux system is a spam zombie.
At least Verio's server notified me instead of black-holing my mail. This time.
The Internet is full. Go away.
All you need do is send the mail to:
user@verizononline.net
that bypasses the spam check, and user still gets the mail. The version users just need to adjust the 'reply to' address to this foramt for all mails to work.
It has to be a Windows box connected directly to the DSL modem.
That way, you end up generating real spam while you're trying to get your real mail through.
Yeah, this system from Verizon is junk. It blocks legitimate email constantly. We currently have 2 businesses in the same building. For some reason, Verizon is constantly blocking one of our business domains from the other business domain. And no amount of phone calls or emails or removal requests have done anything for us. We will shortly be moving to a new provider.
Can all fish swim?
Verizonwireless and verizon telco are actually 2 diferent things. They are also ran seperately. So wireless service has nothing to do with their DSL service. From experience at working tech support for verizon DSL. They do not want to fix problems, everyone there is clueless. There is really no purpose for them to have support except to make customers feel better when they sign up for the service. supervisors do not want to fix issues because they have no idea what to do. It would not do anyone any good to complain even to a supervisor there. It was the most un productive support job that I have ever had. Their goal there is to get you off of the phone as quickly as possible, regardless if your problem is fixed or not.
The whole "Do unto others" thing.
If I was tech support staff, I'd like to be treated like I was able to pass it on that this might be a PR nightmare and have it influence what would be done.
Also, seeing the way the tech support staff handles such a thing is useful, not to mention being able to handle being treated in such a manner is helpful. People who get hurt when being treated in such a manner are really only hurting themselves. I wouldn't be hurt in such a situation, and I'm tired of dealing with a society that thinks acting that way is wrong. It isn't lashing out at the tech support staff just because they're the easist people to reach really doesn't help anybody. It's more accurate to say that it's lashing out at them because their way of life results in them being useless cowards. Am I getting through to you?
Totally wrong.
That sounds suspiciously like "you paid for a running car, not a working horn or radio." If they advertise a service bundle, they need to deliver.
They need to deliver? Or what? Are you going to leave them for the competition? This is like saying Microsoft "needs" to deliver software which is more reliable, immune to viruses, etc. People have been complaining about MS forever, but they still keep buying their products.
You can complain about your ISP's email all you want, but in the end, what can you do? The only thing you can do is cancel your service, because they're certainly not going to care about your whining to tech support. If you're in a metro area, you probably have precisely two choices for broadband: DSL from your phone company, and cable modem service from your cable company. Look around and you'll probably find that no one's particularly thrilled with either one. So if you dump Verizon because their email sucks, you'll have to go with Comcast or whoever (and of course, you'll have to buy a new cable modem since your DSL modem certainly won't work). Now what do you do when you find out their email sucks too?
If you're smart, the only sensible way to deal with this mess is to just concentrate on the service's main offering: internet connectivity. As long as that's working ok, don't worry about all the stupid extras. You can get free email from gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc. Or you can pay a little and get it somewhere else. Either way, you can choose an email provider on its own merits, instead of being tied into something sub-par with your ISP. And as a big bonus, if the day ever comes that you get tired of your ISP's poor connectivity, you can change to their one competitor without having to change your email address and go through the hassle of telling everyone what your new email address is.
She's bad at her job because she doesn't understand the significance of what is being said. It's poor social skills, plain and simple.
See this old /. story. I noticed the list was moved to its own domain and renamed.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
One of my systems handles > 40K messages per day, and I can attest that Verizon email recently became a problem. I added an SPF record, and that instantly solved the problem. (I also filled out the online Verizon form, but haven't heard back yet). Summary: try SPF. http://www.openspf.org/wizard.html
I warned her that VZ has a public relations problem but she was too clueless to understand.
You seem to think that just because you make a statement about VZ making a mistake, that the employee of VZ should back you up. You don't seem to understand the position the employee is in. The calls are more than likely monitored. If she says one thing that berates the company, she could lose her job. Therefore she can't say things like "I totally agree. This was a mistake on our part." Which is obviously what you wanted her to say, since you think she doesn't get it or that she was too clueless. How else was she suppossed to prove to you that she had a clue? Fix the problem? Is that what you really expected her to do? They have a team of engineers on the issue, but you expect the supervisor to magically fix it? She understood just fine. She is just powerless to do anything about it. What you mean to say is that she didn't come out and agree with you completely. You are the customer. You are allowed to say anything you want about the company. They don't care as long as you pay your bill. She is an employee. She is allowed to say only what has been pre-approved. She may be 10 times smarter than anyone on this board. But she is tied by management to only a few select phrases that she can say.
I am sure management has a script that she follows. She is only allowed to say certain things regarding the problem. Bashing the company isn't on the list. She is forced to say thins like "We are committed to bringing you a better email experience. Whatever minor problems there are, we will have fixed in momentarily." She can't voice her anger at having told managment 20 times that this would be a problem, only to have management move forward on it anyway and tell her it is her job to handle the calls so that is what she will do. Quit expecting her to say "Hold on, let me go tell my boss that I agree with the customer that we made a mistake." It is arrogant and naive to expect an employee of that company to bash that company. Give her credit for seeing this coming a mile away, but being powerless to stop it.
It's the fact that there is nothing to distinguish his email server from any of the hundreds (thousands?) of zombies on that same network.
In cases such as this, the best solution is for the home user to over-comply. And that means learning about relaying and getting a relay account on a server that does not look like a zombie.This is not about anyone being an idiot.
This is about making it as easy as possible for the other competent email admins to see that you are not a zombie.
The more concessions you expect from all of them, the more problems you'll face.
If you are on a C/R system and you receive a spam, a challenge message is sent to the supposed sender. Spammers don't use their own email addresses but forge someone else. So for every spam your C/R system receives, it sends out a challenge email to some poor slob who just so happens to own the email address that is being abused today.
So now instead of you receiving a single spam you didn't want, your system received that spam and generater yet another email that someone didn't want. You've effectively doubled the amount of spam!
So, C/R is a piss-poor approach to spam control. On the infrequent occasion I send someone an email and get a C/R message back, I say "Screw it." I'm not going to solve their spam problem for them by jumping through additional hoops. They should just install a decent Bayesian filter and they can solve their spam problem without forcing *me* to go through hoops for them.
I got hosed last week forwarding a phishing email. I got a fake chase bank email - I've been getting them a lot lately - and I forwarded it to abuse@chase.com, like I always do. The next link I click gets hijacked and I'm looking at a WoW page that says my network has been disabled because I have a virus that's sending out phishing emails.
45 minutes later I finally convince the guy that I'm pretty sure my ubuntu box is not infected. Apparently they locked out my connection by dropping a new bin file onto my cable modem that locks out mail service - "noemail.bin". So then we spend 20 minutes trying to get the bin file updated on my cable modem, which is apparently now not accepting updates. The guy asks sheepishly "Any chance you have another cable modem lying around?" Which, strangely, I do, so we get service back up on that modem.
And I say "you really shouldn't cripple people's hardware when they forward phishing emails", and he says, "why don't you try forwarding it again, I really can't believe that was it".
Unfortunately I was all out of cable modems, so I declined.
Not only could the guy not tell me about the rule that tripped the block, he couldn't get anyone to even talk to him about it. His upstream guy told him "just say it's a virus" and hung up on him. And he had no mechanism to open a trouble ticket either, although he told me he'd mention it to his supervisor.
They've been doing this for at least a year. At my previous job (a school), we were put on VZ's blacklist apparently at the request of the recipient of one of our mailing lists. After a week of calling as the network admin of the domain in question (and getting nowhere), I called as a home DSL customer and told them I was missing important information thanks to their policy. They took the domain off of the blacklist immediately.
Wow. A complete and total geek response. A totally useless geek response. It's very very obvious that's you've never dealt with large numbers of "ordinary" users. RSS means they have to a) install new software b) configure new software c) remember to launch the new software and check for new messages.
It's not a solution, it's just a new problem.
ObTagLine: The more you run over the 'possum, the flatter it gets.
Is there any way to get the RSS feed for Slashdot to honor your settings for which numbnut editor you don't want to see articles from? I keep getting ambushed by ScuttleMonkey's asshattery when I follow links from the RSS feed.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Yes, I think it's fair to say "need to deliver". Their terms of service are a contract - they provide x, I provide $. Failure on either of our parts is a breach of that contract. In the end, the only recourse most consumers have is changing services (if possible) - litigation is effectively pointless given the effort:gain ratio.
That said, I'm all for the companies not bundling services I don't need or use (I'll be sticking to my university account). But, if it's included in the contract I signed, I want the option of utilizing it. And if it doesn't work as advertised, it doesn't work. That's my point of view.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
Actually, no, the system from Verizon (VOL) is not a step in the right direction.
Imagine the impact to email in general if EVERY ISP and company use such a bonehead system. Everytime you sent email to a new person (customer / client,) you would have to *find*, then fill out some bizzaro web form. MAYBE in a week or so you will finally be able to send your email. Exactly how does this help things???
VOL's problem is that the group running their email service is a bunch of totally incompetant BOFH a-holes. Instead of deploying well known and effective anti-spam solutions, they are just blacklisting up a storm, and utilizing broken home-grown "sender verification" systems. Meanwhile, the spew of filth from VOL's own network continues to infest the rest of the internet unabated.
VOL's problem with unreliable email service is VERY VERY well known to its customers - check the internal Verizon newsgroups. VOL's customers continue to complain constantly, as they have for nearly 2 years now, about missing or delayed email - but nobody at VOL is listening (or cares.)
I've also had trouble sending mail to AOL, both through an ISP and through standalone servers. I'm glad I'm not in a Comcast area.
We're sorry... ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
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Haida Manga
Last year my smtp server was arbitrarily blocked by Verizon at about the same time it blocked all of Europe. I dutifully filled in the whitelist form, waited a week or so, and was apparently added to the whitelist, or removed from the blacklist.
Everything was fine until a month or two ago when one of my college classmates said he wasn't receiving any of the listserver messages I handle for the class. Sure enough, he was on Verizon, so I once again dutifully filled in the whitelist form, etc., and was cleared in a couple of days.
Last night one of my clients was unable to reach a Verizon customer and forwarded to me the SMTP error reply that was posted in this article. So, once again, I have filled out the form and am waiting breathlessly for their response.
Now I'm not opposed to blacklisting IP's or IP address blocks; I do so myself. But my blocks are of the form "don't take mail allegedly From someone@aol.com unless it originates on a server in *.aol.com". I do block whole swaths of IP space that belong to clueless cable, DSL, or dialup providers like terra.com.br or tiscali.fr. But I'm also very careful to limit those blocks to subdomains that are clearly customer-premises lines. I worked hard over the years to customize the block list very carefully to avoid false positives. The result is to block about 40% of incoming messages at the smtp level.
That being said, there's no reason Verizon should be blocking my server. I'm connected over a ATT-provided business T1; I'm not on any anti-spam blacklist (see http://www.robtex.com/ for a nice one-stop RBL check); I maintain SPF records for all my domains. Yet they have arbitrarily blocked my server on three separate occasions.
My fear is that they respond to customer complaints and blacklist servers because someone received a message with a forged From address. One or another of the domains I host gets forged from time to time. This happened recently to one of my customers. Perhaps a Verizon customer got one of these forged messages, complained to Verizon, and they put my server on the block list (despite the SPF record I maintain for the domain that was forged).
Unfortunately Verizon seems to treat its anti-spam practices as some sort of trade secret. Despite the furor over blocking mail from Europe last year and the class action suit that ensued, they still provide no information about the criteria they use to block senders. And, of course, there's absolutely no information about how to contact a human being to fix any of these problems. In fact, unless Verizon's web site has been changed, there's no way to find the whitelisting form either. You have to know the secret URL or use a Google search to bring up the form.
It's especially unfortunate since I live in Massachusetts, which is Verizon country, so a number of my clients have correspondents with Verizon addresses.
I'm standing with you against those who spread FUD that such behavior isn't helping anyone.
I just wish they'd stop. What you did was a legitimate way to fight back given the current societal climate.
I sent a reply to an email a friend of mine sent me (he is a Verizon customer). I got the same message quoted in this story. I've been corresponding with this friend (him using the same Verizon account, and me the same non-Verizon account) for months.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Oh please - obselete? That's BS. Most of the people I interact with on a daily basis only just grasp email - none of them would have any clue what RSS even was. Hell, I've written RSS clients and even I don't actually use RSS - I just don't find it useful. Plus, it's utterly useless if you're sending out customized content - you'd need a seperate feed URL/params for each user and so you'd also need auth - something which RSS is basically hopeless at.
People (normal people, not people like you) actually LIKE email, when it's appropriate and they asked for it. I LIKE getting emails once a week about concerts I might want to go to, and special offers from the stores I frequently buy from, and automated updates on order status. That's not spam, it's useful information being provided to me because I asked for it. Any "solution" to spam which reduces the usefulness of email as a whole is not a solution.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The big problem with RSS is that NOBODY USES IT.
That is to say, NORMAL people don't use it. Only geeks do. The average user would MUCH rather sign up to receive email updates to something (say, a website updating) than to subscribe to an RSS feed. It's just not intuitive for them.
So until you can get the general public to adopt RSS, mailing lists are going to continue to need to exist.
You have to contact their customers, thair affiliate partners.
Oh and contact more than one news outlet as well as industry-related papers.
I no longer seem to be able to access their web-based email with Firefox for Windows 1.0.
Now that's cross platform!
May the Maths Be with you!
About 3 years ago Verizon began rejecting about half the mail from a mailing list I run to it's subscribers there. Normail mail got through 100% of the time but stuff from a mailing list about a certain type of old German cars got nukked.
For two years 3 grey haired polite chaps used to dealing with local governments (successfully) tried to find out WTF and how to fix it.
After two years Verizon told us all to use a different ISP if they expected reliable email.
Apparantly is IS rocket science.
Need Mercedes parts ?
True, but yuck.
If it is my work email, then I don't want to hear from you unless you are part of my job.
If it is my home email, then I want to hear from you if you are friend or family. I will tolerate hearing from you if we have a bona fide preexisting business relationship and your email is not marketing. (Statements are OK...trying to sell me new stuff is spam.)
If I want more I'll visit your web site.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I can't figure out whether you're a troll or just clueless about customer support. On the off-chance it's the latter, let me try to explain that you are greatly over-estimating the ability of most humans to "figure out" how to install and use an RSS feed, and you are greatly under-estimating the number of humans who call to ask to be added to email-based mailing lists.
Sounds like a perfect solution to me.
Indeed, your idea works well for you, and everybody else who happens to be just like you. Unfortunately, this little group is highly non-representative of the vast majority of retail consumers on this planet.
Well, perhaps not over just yet.
I run a mail system on an IP listed as dynamic (actually it rarely changes). It has proved excellent over the last few years in reducing spam from a torrent to the very occasional drip.
For sending mail, my default is via a commercial service but 95% of my email sent is to a select few, all of who use ISPs that do not dump DynIPs.
Reports of the death of the home server are greatly exaggerated.
Again, I ask you: what are you going to do when they fail to deliver? Change services? What happens when the ONE competitor they have is just as bad? Are you going to change back?
You can talk all you want about how companies should perform according to your TOS contract, but when your only realistic option is to discontinue the service, and there's only two companies with the service which are both bad, you have no real choice. The only realistic choice is to accept the poor performance on the non-essential service, and find another alternative.
In both cases, it seems that the receiving servers are refusing to receive the message at SMTP time.
They do not seem to be accepting the messages and then deleting them.
In my opinion, while it is stupid of Verizon to reject email from Google, they are following the best practice of rejecting the messages at SMTP time so that the gmail user will get a notice saying that their message was rejected.
I've spent a fair amount of time tracking down the error that you're looking at. Its primarily caused by 2 things. Your server sends Verizon spam or its misconfigured.
1. Your server is a known open relay or has otherwise been responsible for sending spam to the Verizon network.
2. Your server is misconfigured. An improperly configured webserver will cause this problem every time. VOL, when receiving an email from a web server, attempts to check the validity and credentials of the sender on the originating SMTP server. If your server fails to respond with an appropriate timeframe or responds incorrectly, your server will be immediately placed on the "black list"
I'd like to note that Verizon has had this (exact same) anti-spam procedure in place for almost a year and a half. I'm still going to say this is "much ado about nothing".
Unfortunately, I probably shouldn't attach my name to this one. I'll post this AC and see if anyone cares to mod up the reason why you're receiving this error.
AC
I thought we had sent out spam.. this explains the problem. Seriously, I got a bunch of these bounces from users this morning, and couldn't figure it out.. nothing looked odd in the mailserver logs.
You can't check the validity of the from address of mail. They blacklist people who's mail servers return tempfails for fuck's sake.
Verizon has the following at the bottom of the referenced whitelist page:
"*Verizon Online reserves the right to restrict access to or from any domain provided at its sole discretion. The information provided to Verizon Online must be wholly correct or the request may be rejected. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide a solution that enables you to send or receive e-mail from a restricted source."
What the hell!!!
I thought in order to protect ISP's "not responsible for content" legal stance, they had to be a utility pipe. Sound like they're in the business of value judgements as to which domains they accept email from....
Anybody have any idea how to get Verizon to just put anybody on our manually maintained whitelist we want? Why should Verizon get a say?
Jesus, even /. doesn't know what Usenet is anymore???
Slashdot, News for AOLers, Stuff that's clueless.
"Why should any MTA operator have to endure constant connection attempts from the zombied PC's of the tards these companies call customers?"
Just use greylisting.
On that note, Uncyclopedia's Coverage of the nigerian census.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Verizon is surely going to behave as a benign force once it has secured legal rights to double bill for bandwidth. Anybody want to help me set up a cellular decentralized shadow to the internet? I won't filter your e-mail if you won't filter mine.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Keep in mind that whoever a customer can actually reach on the phone is probably a call center contractor, not an actual Verizon employee. Speaking as someone who was in that position (until Verizon shut down the center I worked in and fired everyone), the amount of communication coming down from on high is close to nil.
(And, for added fun, the non-union call centers are not allowed to call the union employees of Verizon proper. Good luck getting your stuff fixed when the phone monkeys are barred from speaking to the people who can fix it!)
--saint
( Also, I think email clients should be able to tell the server "I'm online now", and get emails relayed upon arrival until the server fails to connect (or the client announces that it's going offline). Then it can go back to storing messages until the client comes back online. Unfortunately, any ISPs with "pay us extra if you want to run a server" firewalls would make this not work so well. )
ISPs should concentrate on trying to interdict outbound spam rather than imposing filters on inbound messages without the customer's consent. Try explaining to your 91-year-old father -- as I had to do this morning -- that some of his messages are bouncing because they happen to be transmitted through one of AOL's SMTP relays that has been blocklisted by Verizon while others are getting through because they happen to be routed through a different relay. (He sort of understood, and decided the remedy is simply to send everything twice. In other words, now he is spamming me.)
How is forgetting the existence of -devel lists geeky?
Maybe your school mail server really is misconfigured. The fact that most mail servers let through mail from a misconfigured server is probably related to the fact that the vast majority of mail servers are either misconfigured or otherwise mismanaged, including at educational institutions which you'd think would know better.
If the school mail server has no reverse DNS, or invalid reverse DNS, or mismatching reverse DNS, then it isn't going to be deliverable to a growing number of other mail servers (including mine). Just because the majority still accept mail (and spam) from misconfigured servers does not justify expecting everyone to do so.
If the school mail server is an open relay, that's even worse. Not only will an even larger number of networks refuse everything from it, many will refuse everything for a long time after it is fixed (since everyone will have to be notified of the fix).
Tell us what the IP address of the school mail server is. Also tell us the hostname. We can check for obvious problems. If any are found, then get them fixed, even if you have to put a cluestick wound on the mail server admin. There's really no excuse for not doing it right (should do it right the first time).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sorry if this is a dup.
There is a class action suit against Verizon for blocking legit emails. You could get $10 or so, I suspect.
Its ironic that Verizon has been allowed to send notification of this suit via email only. I wonder how many notices have gotten blocked?
There's your problem right there.
You're their ca$h cow.
As an e-mail admin, I have had the same problem many months ago with Comcast. I made phone calls and got nowhere.
But, more intrestingly, is Verizon's idea of cost effectiveness. Block lists are really a poor man's spam filter. A good spam filter will use block lists as only a single factor, one among many. But, to implement a weighted spam filtering system costs $money$.
A while back, I tried an experiment. I captured much of the spam being received (thanks to SpamAssassin), parsed out the sender's IP addressses and created a block list this way. If an IP sent us more than, say, 100 spam messages, then I put them on the list. I did not work out so well. Not a whole lot of spam was blocked, and a few good messages were blocked as well.
From Dictionary.com:
anymore Audio pronunciation of "anymore" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-môr, -mr)
adv.
1.
1. Any longer; at the present: Do they make this model anymore?
2. From now on: We promised not to quarrel anymore.
2. Chiefly Midland U.S. Nowadays.
Regional Note: In standard American English the word anymore is often found in negative sentences:
They don't live here anymore. But anymore is widely used in regional American English in positive sentences with the meaning "nowadays": "We use a gas stove anymore" (Oklahoma informant in DARE). Its use, which appears to be spreading, is centered in the South Midland and Midwestern states, as well as in the Western states that received settlers from those areas. The earliest recorded examples are from Northern Ireland, where the positive use of anymore still occurs.
Looks to me like the parent's use of "anymore" is entirely appropriate.
What?
In my opinion Verizon must be going against Constitution rights by filtering spam this way. I give no one permission to decide what emails reach my personal email account, least of all in my opinion a big confused company like Verizon. I pay for Symantec Norton protection which filters Spam according to my specifications and judgement. Interesting subject.
About a month or two ago Road Runner decided to do a block on all mail originating from the servers of my registrar. www.DirectNIC.com one of the larger ones out there.
Unfortunately all of my e-mail, and all the e-mails for all of the business partners I have are routed through their respecitve domains with DirectNIC as the mail fwd.
I did their whitelist process but they could not do anything manually. It took 24-48 hours. The registrar didn't even have a way to contact these asshats.
The dipshits in tech support had NO WAY to get ahold of the network engineers to let them know they had created a major mistake. It was pathetic.
Libertas in infinitum
it is ridiculous you need to request a provider take you off their email blacklist. it seems to me they need to bend over backward if they inconvenience their customers to this extent. you know, i would bitch for a free month of service.
fantastic use of "problem" too. it drives the point home.
"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."
You might be happier with a different email service. That way, if you ever want to bolt from Verizon, you don't have to mess around with changing your email address.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
These days, there's nothing an IVR can tell me that the company's website can't tell me. If I'm calling customer service, it's because I can't do what I need to do using any automated system (the website, or the IVR) and I need to speak with a real, live, human being. Preferrably, one who speaks passable English.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
use GMail instead.
I can't think of a reason to use Verizon e-mail with all the problems they've had. You can also get pretty good e-mail with a $5/mo shell account if you want something with more control.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
By contrast, one of the ISPs where I get email also uses country-based blacklists, but lets the user pick which countries. So I block all email from China, Korea, and Nigeria, but I know some people in Japan and Israel so that mail from there only gets extra-heavy filtering instead of total blockage.
In general, the old model that said that an ISP provided Internet access and also an email account and some web hosting isn't really current. Sure, most ISPs do provide email accounts, and probably use them for administrative email, but there are lots of good places to get email, whether webmail or POP/IMAP-mail or whatever, and it's often not worth using your ISP's email service even if it's included for free - shop around for an email provider you like.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
By contrast, a message that says "You're on Blacklist X, so go away or get off the list at http://www.example.net/spammer-apologies!" is at least semi-useful, if the blacklist actually responds to questions (some do, some don't.) I usually see 451 messages from Greylisting, so just because you got blocked the first time doesn't mean your mail won't be accepted 30 minutes later.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks