Live data from Hacker News

Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

taoshu.in

161–170 of 257 posts

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#161

Outlook/Hotmail blocks DigitalOcean. After half a dozens attempts over the years to delist my IP, and following all the best practices (dedicated fixed IP, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, FCrDNS, zero spam, TLS, etc.) I gave up. Eventually, most people realize that their Outlook/Hotmail email service is defective because they're not receiving emails, and they migrate to another email service.

Or folks will check where their spam comes from. At least 2-3 years ago digital ocean was a ridiculously major source of spam. I've no interest in investigating why, but there is a near zero chance they were following anything like "all the best practices".

This is from DO's own site based on a quick search:

"I am being BOMBARDED, and I mean BOMBARDED with spam from Digital Ocean over 5 spams a day all from the same bunch of domains, all hosted on DigitalOcean and coming from your IPs.

In the last 2 weeks I’ve emailed your abuse mailbox 20+ times and filled in the contact abuse form 10+ times.

NOTHING is being done about it. My next plan of action is to keep posting here until Digital Ocean takes action.

Do you even have an abuse team? are they doing any work at all? I can provide 30 more samples if needed."

Absolutely pathetic - all major providers should blackhole email from DO.

Note that this contrasts to AWS. I was on AWS from flat network days (where folks were running scans internally etc. AWS respond with a ticket usually to abuse reports and then usually a bit later a note that things have been taken care of.

How does AWS which is FAR larger in IP address space than DO have so much LESS spam coming from their IP address space? Perhaps because they pay a tiny bit of attention to the issue.

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#162
post #33
post #22

Is this mira of a U.S. centric problem? I selfhost my mail in Germany, have one at a smaller mail provider and never had problems. It is also not uncommon for companies to either have a local Exchange Server or use the mail service at their hosting provider. If everything is configured correctly, delivery works fine.

Your experience may not be typical. I ran mail servers before office 365 was a thing, and I often had to get off block lists. There are stories on HN about it being worse, now that you have to request unblocking from MS and Google. Yours is the first comment that doesn't complain.

> Yours is the first comment that doesn't complain.

It is potentially more of those with problems are more likely to speak up than everyone else just posting "works fine for me" a thousand times over.

I haven't had much deliverability problems with self-hosted things. I set it up right, and I get the emails I expected to get. So there's now two of us saying "works fine for me."

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#163

I work on Microsoft's anti-spam team, AMA!

I guess my question is can you please fix your braindead blacklisting? Several times per year—I can practically guarantee it’ll happen sometime in December, and indeed had to deal with this just five days ago—I end up with a bunch of users whose email notifications stop working because Microsoft have started blocking the entire netrange where my server lives. I don’t have control over other Linode customers, guys! I…

> I don’t have control over other Linode customers, guys!

You do have control over being a Linode customer though. If Linode isn't doing enough to prevent abuse, they deserve to be blocked.

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#164

We go through this every few months. Here's the recipe - 1. Visit https://olcsupport.office.com/ and submit the complaint. 2. Wait for the auto-reply, followed by the "Nothing was detected" email. 3. Reply to the latter with "Escalate" in the body. Within a day, they hammer shit in place and the block is removed.

Really love the modern support experience of no-response, trial-and-error, until suddenly, if you're lucky, the void on other end magically solves the problem. Confidence-inspiring stuff

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#166

We go through this every few months. Here's the recipe - 1. Visit https://olcsupport.office.com/ and submit the complaint. 2. Wait for the auto-reply, followed by the "Nothing was detected" email. 3. Reply to the latter with "Escalate" in the body. Within a day, they hammer shit in place and the block is removed.

Really love the modern support experience of no-response, trial-and-error, until suddenly, if you're lucky, the void on other end magically solves the problem. Confidence-inspiring stuff

It occurs to me that I make fun of sovereign citizen types, but in tech we have our own set of rituals for getting large organizations to do what we want. While those people are still boneheads, maybe I should be more empathetic about their motivations and why they think that this time it might work.

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#167

I run a small transactional email provider ( https://mailpace.com ), our IPs are very rarely added to blocklists- but we are very strict on what we allow through our service, and surprisingly we’ve had no long term delivery issues with any of the big providers. So thanks to the federated/decentralized design of email, is totally possible to be part of the network without any special privileges. We are sending million…

We host in a datacenter and sending from their IPv4 or our own /24 IPv4 block has no issue. We also have the volume to keep things going as well to build up the reputation.

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal anecdote != universal, global experience. > have one at a smaller mail provider a) [hosted] Mail provider b) Server (colo/dedicated/VPS/whatever) provider Choose one. > not uncommon for companies to either have a local Exchange Server Yes and it's PITA to pull it out of the lists of some shitheads, like SpamHaus. Source: guess it

SpamHaus always has really good reasons for doing what they're doing. How'd you piss them off? There are actually horrid lists like BackScatterer and UCEProtect that you can't even properly contact. So in comparison SH is super pleasant.

> SpamHaus always has really good reasons

Ah, yes, blocking entire /18 and demanding money for the delisting.

I guess 'Guilty by association' is a 'good reason'.

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really love the modern support experience of no-response, trial-and-error, until suddenly, if you're lucky, the void on other end magically solves the problem. Confidence-inspiring stuff

It occurs to me that I make fun of sovereign citizen types, but in tech we have our own set of rituals for getting large organizations to do what we want. While those people are still boneheads, maybe I should be more empathetic about their motivations and why they think that this time it might work .

People like to make fun of sovereign citizen types who think the law is magic spells, and if you only say the right words you have to be let off the hook or not pay taxes or whatever.

The thing is though that that notion is absolutly right. The law is like fucking magic.

what else could explain the fact that misspeaking even one word of the incantation will cause the magical shield of +5 "rights against self incrimination" to fizzle (or perhaps missfire and summon a canine companion) when being attacked by pigs?

the joke, if folks dont get the reference to an oldish story, is that you do actually in real life need to be be very specific and clear to cops in order to "invoke" your fifth amendment rights. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...

Which is incredibly stupid, but is just one example of the many ways in which law is so weird and unintuitive that its super easy for the uneducated to assume there are tons of weird eldrich legal phrases that if only spoken in the right place and time will conjure legal protection. Of course we who know better know that those eldrich legal phrases need to be spoken by a trained wizard (lawyer) with enough mana (money, time) at their disposal.

Re: Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It occurs to me that I make fun of sovereign citizen types, but in tech we have our own set of rituals for getting large organizations to do what we want. While those people are still boneheads, maybe I should be more empathetic about their motivations and why they think that this time it might work .

People like to make fun of sovereign citizen types who think the law is magic spells, and if you only say the right words you have to be let off the hook or not pay taxes or whatever. The thing is though that that notion is absolutly right. The law is like fucking magic. what else could explain the fact that misspeaking even one word of the incantation will cause the magical shield of +5 "rights against self incrimin…

When the accepted interpretation of the US constitution allows for civil asset forfeiture or indefinite detention lawyers have no rights scoffing at magical ideas. The whole thing is Harry Potter nonsense.
Post reply on HN