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Spam blacklisting is out of control

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Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#141

Post by bo1024 »

noduerme wrote: post #108
mjrpes wrote: post #34

I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost. You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in th…

I manage an outbound mail server for a mid-sized company. I happen to also use it for my own personal mail. We have had on and off deliverability issues for years (AT&T and Comcast being the worst). As head of IT it fell to me to post whitelisting requests and try to get mail delivering again. I decided after awhile that this really isn't my job, and made a suggestion to the CEO which he took to heart: There is anoth…

Do you know what the lawyers said beyond "I'm a lawyer and would like you to edit the blacklist" ? Are these companies doing something illegal by blacklisting you unfairly, or do you have grounds for some sort of civil suit (if so, what grounds)?

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#142

Post by jsnell »

newaccount74 wrote: post #100
berdon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this. My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them. Ideally you should just be able to reply to the message and tell them about the error. If there's no way to contact a company, that's a whole different problem, and not really one that would be fixed with unsubscribe links in important email messages.

> That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them.

That implies a level of manual effort on the part of the recipient that's unreasonable. I have no relationship with these companies. They did not verify the email address before starting to send a stream of supposedly transactional messages to it. They should be happy that I'm willing to click unsubscribe when available, because the alternative is to set up a mark-as-spam filtering rule that'll hopefully tank their sender reputation.

Writing them via a contact form begging to be removed is not an option.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#143

Post by cure »

yosamino wrote: post #45

This is a complaint about "UCEPROTECT Blacklist Policy LEVEL 3" [0] It's description is not subtle: > This blacklist has been created for HARDLINERS. It can, and probably will cause collateral damage to innocent users when used to block email. So if the mailsystem you are trying to reach employs it, is either experiencing spam levels that justify it's use - OR they made a mistake in using it, if this is the sole reas…

> The next thing you can do, instead of paying for whitelisting, ist to contact the mailserver-admin at system you are trying to deliver mail to. This can be a bit of a hassle - seeing that your mailserver just got blocked - but it usually works. The same way systems don't want to receive SPAM they also don't want to overblock, after all they want their users to receive emails as well. If you are the mail admin of a sending system and you're reaching out to the receiving system this is usually a pretty good indicator that you don't want to spam them.

That's nice in theory. In practice, UCEPROTECT level 3 is used by, for example, all Microsoft properties (including hotmail, etc). And UCEPROTECT level 3 lists a lot of netblocks.

So, if you want to send e-mail from, say, Digital Ocean, to any Microsoft managed e-mail domain, you can just forget about it. DO doesn't care, Microsoft very much doesn't care. Good luck trying to contact a postmaster there!

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#144

Post by kazinator »

> I run my own email server, and don’t use any blacklist. Yes, I got some amount of SPAMs. However, the vast majority of trashy emails I receive each day are advertisements (I signed up for random stuff quite liberally).

You don't run a mail server for other people who are not so careful with their e-mail addresses, let alone for a large organization. You don't run a mail server which hosts public mailing lists.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#145

Post by pteraspidomorph »

marcosdumay wrote: post #50
syshum wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>/24 netblock on the second offense. That seems excessive and abusive, I am not aware of any commercial ISP that is giving out /24 anymore. /29 is most common, I had to practically beg to get a /28 so what is the justification for banning an /24???

Block registers don't deal with "justification". If they did, what would be Google's justification for blocking senders that send too few emails?

I wish I knew. I have a user google keeps blocking for spam (not even marking, outright blocking) while at the same time their reporting tool say the user doesn't send enough e-mail to google for any data to be displayed (the user's domain generates less than ten e-mails per day, many/most of which not to google).

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#146

Post by jasode »

noduerme wrote: post #108
mjrpes wrote: post #34

I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost. You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in th…

I manage an outbound mail server for a mid-sized company. I happen to also use it for my own personal mail. We have had on and off deliverability issues for years (AT&T and Comcast being the worst). As head of IT it fell to me to post whitelisting requests and try to get mail delivering again. I decided after awhile that this really isn't my job, and made a suggestion to the CEO which he took to heart: There is anoth…

>Get your legal department involved. We have repeatedly been taken off various public and private blacklists by having lawyers do their job.

What's the particular law that makes those curators of blacklists pay attention to your company's lawyers? Do you have example text of those legal requests?

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#147

Post by bo1024 »

wl wrote: post #39
rsync wrote: post #31

I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. Which is to say, you're a paying customer of a service and we send you some kind of alert or critical announcement ... and it should have an unsubscribe link. You absolutely should. The amount of junk I get because someone else signed up for something and fat fingered their email ad…

That's a different problem. They should have first sent a confirmation email, then paused all communications until it was confirmed.

But once the email is confirmed, I think it's totally fair for a company like rsync to say 'if you're a paying customer of this service, then we need to send you certain information to fulfill our obligations in the contract, if you truly don't like it cancel your account and take your business elsewhere.'

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#148

Post by lodovic »

Email has basically been taken over by Microsoft and Google. They set the rules and decides who can is blacklisted. Although to me, email has become increasingly less relevant, to a point where I only check it once a week or so.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#150

Post by bo1024 »

wl wrote: post #54
derefr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a (very legitimate and important) reason to do double opt-in unilaterally for all email communications. Companies should make 100% sure that the person who signed up, and the person receiving the email, are the same person, before they associate the email with the account. Otherwise, malicious people can sign up arbitrary third parties for tons of random crap. But it's not a good reason for adding unsubscribe…

> So consider the extreme case: what if the user fat-fingers an unsubscribe (without realizing) to their local electric company's e-invoices, which is what been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill? To name a specific example of this problem, I want Gulf Power of Florida to stop sending exactly the kind of email you speak of. Bills. Nastygrams when the person falls behind on the bills. Unwant…

I think you're trying to use two wrongs to make a right. If we're talking about things Gulf Power of Florida should do differently, then rather than add unsubscribe buttons to bills which is a bad idea, they should confirm people's email addresses before sending them email.
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