OT: blacklisted email servers

My head is being well and truly 'done in' at the moment as for the last couple of days my ISP's email servers (VirginMedia) have been blacklisted by spamcop.net, which means that some other ISPs sre refusing to accept my outgoing email and it's bouncing; not a damned thing I can do about it. Presumably it's been caused by some VM user sending spam.

It's happened before and is incredibly frustrating, not least because sometimes you don't even get the error message, and have no way of knowing that your outgoing mail has simply vanished into the ether.

I assume this is something all ISPs are prone to, or are VM more susceptible than others? Are there any clever simple tricks to get round the issue other thsan changing?

Reply to
Lobster
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Best answer is never to use ISP's email in the first place. However that is based largely on the difficulty of moving - telling all your contacts to use your new email address. And if your switch is rather sudden, maybe not even being able to get all your mail from your old ISP's email servers.

Reply to
polygonum

The best way, IME, is to buy a domain. Then use an email provider that let's you supply your own domain - or run your own email server.

Either way, if you get grief, you do have the option of changing email host without changing your address.

Reply to
Tim Watts

That depends on your connectivity. Those bastards BT, for example, make you jump through hoops and discourage use of anything but their outgoing servers. Problem with running your own server is that a good lot of consumer IP addresses are on a dynamic blocklist anyway, so you end up having to smarthost out via the ISP anyway. The fact that your incoming mail is handled one way doesn't help the outgoing path, unless your hosting co provides a smarthost, or your ISP gives you a fixed IP that you can assign the correct DNS records.

IME Virgin don't get blacklisted too often. Talk Talk, however, do regularly.

Reply to
Chris Bartram

the problem is generally in sending and that means you have to use a clean relay.

If you can't set up and run your own, you need an account with someone else's.

That is completely independent of what email address you use to RECEIVE email...

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Just not very active in killing the out going spam and getting their servers off the black lists (or simply changing to another IP address for outgoing mail).

+1

+1

Er run them in parallel? There shouldn't be any need to change ISP but some ISPs do block various ports that does make running your own MTA over complicated. However port blocking doesn't affect webmail nor should it affect collection via POP3/IMAP from a remote server.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Summary of the problem:

1/. No one will accept mail directly from a consumer level IP address. .. 2/... Except certain relays... 3/. ...Which either recognise that you are 'within their IP range'. I.e. you are their customer... 4/. ...Or use authenticated SMTP, so are their (different sort) of customer... 5/. ...If a ISP customer starts sending spam....through the ISP relay...it will get blocked for everybody... 6/. Ergo you need an authenticated relay somewhere... 7/...which is cool because it can be used from any ISP anywhere in the world.

try:

formatting link

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

If you switched from Demon to BT but didn't think about the fact that your email was hosted by Demon until it stopped working...

Reply to
polygonum

That has a BTDTGTTS sound to it. B-)

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Not myself but was helping someone in precisely that situation yesterday.

Reply to
polygonum

Well since Virgin has been using Google it seems to be a lot better. Thus one supposes that even a disposable google address will also fail. I was wondering if some people had simply stopped talking to me but I suppose this is the reason. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

True re dymanic IPs. However I never had any trouble with a mailserver on an Andrews&Arnold static IP. However, these days I run a linod server for that.

Do BT really block, say, Gmail SMTP? Because one option is signing up to Google Apps and binding your domain to that.

Reply to
Tim Watts

Well, I've just run a quick check and the VM servers are sending to the BT servers. At least, for 'ntlworld.com' originators.

I have a fairly "rich" email environment.

I have a number of legacy BT accounts - I pay BT about £1.50 a month to keep them active although I have no other contract with BT. This dates from the time that the free Talk21 email system was closed down IIRC.

I have a number of VM accounts (my current ISP) with both 'ntlworld.com' and 'virginmedia.com' in the mix.

I have some Gmail accounts.

I have some Hotmail accounts.

In general AIUI ISPs won't accept mail from their users to be relayed on behalf of other originating email domains. Sensible as they cannot authenticate to confirm that the originator actually owns that particular email address.

So I send mail the same way I retrieve it - to and from the home server for the mail domain with an authenticated connection using the credentials of the originating email system.

With regard to work rounds, unless you can find a mail relay which trusts you not to lie about originator email addresses (which must be a temptation to all SPAMers) then any mail server is likely to be black listed from time to time unless its SPAM policing is well above average.

So the best you can probably do is to maintain a second email account on a different server so that you don't get cut off if there is a temporary black list. Gmail is an obvious option here.

If you wanted, you could include your second email address as a BCC on all outgoing mail so that you can confirm that it has been delivered somewhere, and not blocked on the ISP's server.

You could, alternatively, have a background 'ping' email process which sent regular emails between the two accounts to confirm that mail delivery was working. This does require a bit of tinkering, though.

Cheers

Dave R

Reply to
David

I ran a mail server for years on virgin and Sky dynamic addresses and only had one email rejected. That was some university which I forget.

I use a 1and1 account since my mail server died as its cheaper than fixing the old one.

Reply to
dennis

There are two ways that relays avoid being 'open for spam'

One is to accept from only IP addresses 'inside our network'

The other is to require authentication before accepting an email.

The first is adopted by ISPs, the second by independent email providers not part of any particular ISP. Or by enlightened ISPs.

The latter approach needs more setting up by the customer, but has the twofold advantage that its roaming capable - any mobile device can send using it, from any network - and is amenable to instant account termination if abused.

The process fopr sending and recieving mail are for nearly all domestic users totally different.

- to and from the home server

Not really. Its just that 'open to any device in my IP range' is, with dynamic addressing, and people freeloading on the neighbours wifi or hotspots, impossible to police.

servers and accounts are not the issue here.

It is that the sending relay gets blacklisted.

Sadly that doesn't work. Your own ISP is unlikely to blacklist its own relay,. so you will get the mail always, unless you are on an independent mail server like gmail.

get a crappo gmail account and use that to test if you can send.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Dont try it these days.

The universities used to reject on 'I cant get a reverse DNS for you' stuff. These days everybody with any sense rejects on 'its from a dynamic IP pool'

I've moved all my mail to my own fixed IP address virtual server. At least that way I can fix it if anything goes wrong.

And it tells me if it has...

recommended for nerds

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

It was working earlier this year.

Reply to
dennis

As far as I can tell the authentication approach is the default when mail clients set up accounts automatically, at least for BT and Gmail accounts. As far as I can recall most ISPs will not now relay foreign email domains from their own IP addresses.

Sigh! Not what I said at all. I send and receive using an authenticated connection (see below) to the mail server for the mail domain which owns the email address. I am not claiming to send and receive using the same email protocol. For example, I can use POP3 to pick up mail and SMTP to send mail. However, both connections are authenticated.

Of course they are!

So the point of having another email account is that you make an authenticated connection to ANOTHER email server, thus providing a second route to and from the email server community (I nearly said cloud). This makes sure that if your ISP server is temporarily blacklisted that you can still send and receive email.

Whoah! By accident you somehow seem to have agreed with me! Yes, an INDEPENDENT server! Which is the whole point of having an alternative email address. Oh, hey, I did say "So the best you can probably do is to maintain a second email account on a DIFFERENT server so that you don't get cut off if there is a temporary black list. Gmail is an obvious option here."

I've some bad news for you about your comprehension test........

Cheers

Dave R

Reply to
David

However it is of course perfectly possible to use SMTP for both sending and receiving E-Mail. It's the way that E-Mail always used to work on Unix and works perfectly well on Linux. It's what I do on my desktop machine at home. I run an SMTP server and it delivers mail to my mail spool from where my mail program (mutt) reads it directly. When I send mail it goes via the same SMTP server.

Reply to
cl

Which is exactly the same, except that the SMTP server and the POP3 server reside on your local machine.

No different to me receiving mail via SMTP on my local mail server (which I do) and then using POP3 or IMAP to pick it up.

Reply to
Bob Eager

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