Spam blacklisting is out of control

https://blog.roastidio.us/posts/spam_blacklists_are_out_of_control/

by derekzhouzhen • 4 years ago

388 414 4 years ago

blog.roastidio.us

There is a typo in their title. If intentional please instead consider words like block reject and deny for the people that do not speak English as a first language.

I've dealt with real time blocklists as long as they have existed. They are not going away any time soon. I agree that the paid exception lists are a bit shady but I also see the validity of their methods of temporarily punishing everyone on a hosts network to put pressure on the ISP/platform provider to police it's own network and remove spammers. The best one can do today aside from securing ones own server is to research an ISP's IP space ahead of time to see how dirty they are. There are plenty of providers that cleaned up their act some time ago. Linode is a great example of change. New accounts can't even send email unless they open a ticket and prove they made some effort to comply with can-spam. More providers need to follow that example so that we don't run into this problem of dirty networks that real time block-lists like UceProtect have listed. It's an imperfect solution to an old ugly problem.

r_hoods_ghost2• 4 years ago

Yeah except we've had this recently with Linode's IP range landing on that exact blacklist and being blocked by Microsoft and other major mail providers, knocking out our ability to send to huge chunks of our customers. I've had to get the mail server moved off Linode to another hosting company as paying the ransom fee did nothing. UceProtect does seem at least as morally dubious if not more so that the spammers it alleges to protect against.

boudin3• 4 years ago

Which other major provider uses this list? Uceprotect is attempting to racket me from time to time. While I'm blocked i try different providers to guess the ones using this, I only found Hotmail blocking me.

collegeburner2• 4 years ago

What hosts are best for running a mail server? I have the same issue.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

It's "blacklist" in most languages though so the non-standard "block list" would be probably more confusing to non-native speakers. Anyway they clearly meant blacklist.

derekzhouzhen10• 4 years ago

Thanks, I fixed the typo.

Blocking outgoing port 25 unless going through an extra step is IMHO against the spirit of the internet, and would make operating a personal email server harder than necessary. The world of email is already too centralized as it is.

LinuxBender4• 4 years ago

against the spirit of the internet

I completely agree. I believe the commonly used phrase is and this is why we can't have nice things. The open and decentralized internet is also open to people with ill intent. We can solve things with technical solutions, monetary solutions and/or legislative solutions. All of these are double edged swords and have varying degrees of effectiveness and unintended side effects in my opinion.

I don't really know what the right solution should have been that would have made everyone happy minus the people with ill intent.

spcebar• 4 years ago

I too have had issues with that particular blacklist, which, I believe, is gaining notoriety as a scam. In my case I was setting up outgoing email for a customer's WordPress website. In the end, rather than spending the time and money dealing with the blacklist, we routed their mail through Sendgrid. Not an especially happy ending, but their email works now.

PeterisP• 4 years ago

I can complain to my hosting company and hope they evict the bad user from the network. But then why should my hosting company do so?

The answer to this is the other option, leaving the hosting company. In this manner, every hosting company gets a choice - either they will kick out legal-but-immoral things like spammers, or they will not and rightly lose their above-board customers.

This is essentially how the global e-mail community self-polices by establishing a norm that a host either has to work to exclude bad actors or will get boycotted/excluded for allowing them.

cgriswald• 4 years ago

His whole defense of the hosting company's hypothetical failure to help is bizarre. He considers a lot of things that aren't his concern or even really his business. A real analysis of whether to complain would only consider whether the hosting company will be responsive and whether they are competent to fix the problem.

Why is he considering—with incomplete information—the hosting company's legal options and the severity of the spamming?

Edited to add: He could also consider whether it is his hosting company with the problem or the orgs using UCEPROTECT; although as someone who needs their emails to go through "no matter what" that can be more difficult.

indymike2• 4 years ago

The answer to this is the other option, leaving the hosting company. In this manner, every hosting company gets a choice - either they will kick out legal-but-immoral things like spammers, or they will not and rightly lose their above-board customers.

This assumes that the RBL in question is a good actor. It is as bad as the spammers.

This is essentially how the global e-mail community self-polices by establishing a norm that a host either has to work to exclude bad actors or will get boycotted/excluded for allowing them.

Most of us have ignored UCEPROTECTCTL lists for a long long time as it appears to be a money grab.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

This post meanders between complaining about RBLs and vaguely whining about the big email hosts, but I don't see the connection. There is zero useful information contained in the RBLs and the big hosts don't use them.

derekzhouzhen10• 4 years ago

I believe that outlook.com starts using UCEPROTECTL2/3. However I have no proof so I have to be vague about it.

It is in the interest of big email hosts to shut out small, independent senders to strengthen their position of monopoly. Again, I have no proof.

shirro3• 4 years ago

When Exchange hosting which is just about every business in Australia it seems (and possibly outlook.com and 365) blocked a huge range of IPs, a lot of people went to IP blocklist searches and saw the only entry was UCEPROTECT3 and connected the events. It is very possible they are unrelated or it crept in through another provider's product without anyone there explicitly choosing to use it. Unfortunately the whole system is very opaque.

csnover2• 4 years ago

Fortunately for the author, I haven’t noticed any email servers that use the UCEPROTECTL3 RBLs to reject mail—which is to say, I’ve noticed some servers I administer end up on UCEPROTECTL3 incidentally and it has never caused a delivery problem.

On the other hand, some VPS providers are still allocating multiple customers to the same IPv6 /64 using SLAAC by default, and this will make it impossible to deliver mail on IPv6 since reputable RBLs always blacklist the whole /64.

As far as the argument about spamming being immoral but not illegal, I’ve never seen a reputable ISP that didn’t prohibit unsolicited bulk email in their terms of use, so the grounds for reporting it is that a customer is violating the terms that they agreed to follow when they signed up.

And to answer the question of whether or not RBLs are useful: in my experience, yes, they are quite useful. The biggest problem I’ve noticed with them is not typically false positives on small providers, but false negatives on giant companies like Google who cannot ever end up on an RBL because they process so much mail but don’t do a good enough job of preventing their servers from being used to send spam.

vsviridov2• 4 years ago

Outlook properties seemingly use uceprotect lists. Outlook support even has a page for getting off their block list, but I could never get a reply.

And my hosting provider basically said "we're warning against using our servers for outbound email", which amounts to "we're not gonna do anything about your bad neighbors that landed you on the uceprotect lvl2&3 lists"

Been running my own email for 18 years, and outlook is the only place that i have problems delivering to.

csnover2• 4 years ago

Outlook definitely engage in aggressive blocking of netranges, but I’m pretty sure they don’t use UCEPROTECT to do this since I’ve seen servers caught in Outlook netrange blocks despite all the public RBLs (including UCEPROTECTL3) showing no problem.

Just to be sure, you are using the Outlook form[0] and not the Office365 form? Have you signed up for SNDS?[1] All these hoops are pretty dumb, and I don’t think they have updated any of these systems since the mid-2000s so they are also pretty terrible to use, but here we are.

My limited personal experience with Outlook’s removal process is that it’s just slow and confusing (sometimes 12 hours for a response, sometimes the response emails are empty). The last time I had to do this, their TLS certificates had expired (and they use HSTS), so I could not even get into SNDS for half the day until someone there finally noticed and deployed new certificates.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/supportrequestform/8ad563e3-28...

[1] https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/

pandemicsoul2• 4 years ago

Spam blocklists are run by an unaccountable cowboy cult that somehow has managed to consolidate a ton of power simply for the fact that most people who run email inbox services didn't want to deal with the problem of spam, so they were more than willing to just hand over anti-spam "enforcement" to anyone who was allegedly doing "what was best for the internet." There's no check on these people who run these blacklists, and the system they've built is entirely a black box, antithetical to the principles of the open internet. And if you're not a huge corporation that can afford professional management of your email deliverability, good luck – the individuals and small organizations are just out of luck. It's a miserable racket and for what?

If you want to know why there's a new thread each week on HN about why it's impossible to host your own email service, this is why.

convolvatron2• 4 years ago

no. its because of spam. just because these people are doing a less than perfect job of keeping the screaming hordes out of my inbox doesn't remove any of the blame from the hordes.

pixl972• 4 years ago

It's been years since I last hosted my own mail server, and even then the HAM to SPAM ratio was well over 1:100. The torrent of absolute crap faced at port 25 is unbelievable.

multjoy• 4 years ago

So what's the alternative? SBLs work, clearly, and almost every mail host, in the absence of distributed list, would work up their own lists in short order.

ILMostro73• 4 years ago

Choose your SBL better; spend some time reading about it (doesn't have to be much) or testing it before blindly enabling it.

istillwritecode2• 4 years ago

Let's not classify all spam blacklists as the same. UCEPROTECT is in a special class of extortionist cowboy, because it's basically just an inaccurate protection racket throwing a wide net across cloud providers who won't play their game. Some other blacklists are updated regularly and only contain IP addresses that have actually sent spam. By contrast, UCEPROTECT3 just lumps ISPs into the list even though an address has never sent spam.

I run a mail server on AWS, and we use some blacklists to drop mail. It's quite effective and that's why people keep using them. A properly curated blacklist is a powerful tool, and more accurate than the machine learning mush that people have come to rely upon.

yosamino2• 4 years ago

CEPROTECT3 just lumps ISPs into the list even though an address has never sent spam.

But this is by design[0]

This blacklist has been created for HARDLINERS. It can, and probably will cause collateral damage to innocent users when used to block email.

And it makes for a perfectly usable blocklist. If you use postfix, the postscreen_dnsbl_threshold and postscreen_dnsbl_sites parameters let you create a simple scoring system:

  postscreen_dnsbl_threshold      = 10
  postscreen_dnsbl_sites          =
    zen.spamhaus.org*5,
    bl.spameatingmonkey.net*5,
    dnsbl.sorbs.net*4,
    bl.spamcop.net*4,
    dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net*3

I made up the numbers, because you will need to monitor your system for a while to see if they make sense, but the principle holds. Also make sure that the dnsbl you are using are working for you.

But it isn't really a problem with uceprotect, it's about how DNSBLs are used.

[0] https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5 [1] http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#postscreen_dnsbl_site...

Cadwhisker• 4 years ago

I also run an email server. I just used https://mxtoolbox.com/ to check my status and yep, UCEPROTECTL3 is the ONLY one to have my IP range listed.

The article sums it up nicely: IP blacklists have their place, however, please don’t use the overarching neighbouring blacklists such as UCEPROTECTL2 and UCEPROTECTL3.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

UCEPROTECT is just horrible, full stop. Stuff like [1] read like it's written by a 13 year old. Lots more where that came from; as near as I can tell UCEPROTECT is run by a single person who is consistently vitriolic like this to anyone offering even the mildest of criticisms (supposedly multiple people have involved over the years, but their, ehm, distinct colourful personalities are so alike that I'm inclined to think it's just the same person using different aliases).

People have been complaining about this for a very long time; as long as I can remember. In the past they've also just permanently added people's IPs after complaining their IPs were wrongfully listed (not sure if they still do that).

The UCEPROTECT blacklist should be blacklisted by everyone. Yes, we need a blacklist of blacklists.

[1] http://www.uceprotect.org/cart00neys/2021-001.html

pandemicsoul2• 4 years ago

Spamhaus, which (as far as I can tell) is seen as the "most legitimate" blacklist is just as bad, if not worse. UCEPROTECT might be extorting you, but at least you know the name of the game. With Spamhaus, any email sender can get blacklisted for whatever nonsense rules Spamhaus comes up with – many times a set of entrapments they themselves have devised – and they have zero urgency or clarity around resolving it. "Fix the problem" they say. Okay, what's the problem? "Be a better sender." Okay, how? It's like a conversation with Yoda.

To be clear: I DON'T think blacklists are the problem. I think the problem is that a half-dozen major blacklists are controlled by unaccountable organizations who make up rules willy nilly, and privilege major email senders while punishing smaller senders / home hobbyists.

garbagecoder• 4 years ago

Still better than the alternative

Godel_unicode4• 4 years ago

antithetical to the principles of the open internet.

No. These blocklists are employed by the actor receiving the email. They have a perfect right, even on "the open internet", to decide that they want to limit who can send them messages.

There are tons of checks on the people who provide those blacklists, in the form of their users complaining about lack of mail delivery and ultimately not using their list anymore. We vote with our wallets, and as a group we have decided that these blocklists are useful.

and for what?

To make email usable. Full stop.

Underphil• 4 years ago

Absolutely agree. This doesn't fall under the principles of the open internet nor anything in the 'net neutrality' arena. You have no right to expect anyone to receive traffic from your server if they choose not to. It's a major pitfall of running your own relay, but it's not unethical.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

These blocklists are employed by the actor receiving the email.

If I send an email to alice@example.com, Alice is the recipient, not Bob the sysadmin for example.com.

boudin3• 4 years ago

UCEPROTECT is a scam. Blocking innocent people and asking them for money has nothing to do with security. The good thing is that most email servers do not use it because it's just bad. The bad thing is that Hotmail uses it (or at least was at until recently). It does mean that, as a Hotmail user, there's legitimate email that you won't receive.

I do wonder if the guy behinf this scam is randomly blocking whole ip ranges to make a living, having enough people agreeing to the racket.

indymike2• 4 years ago

RBLs are useful, but there are a few that are not what they appear to be. The particular one in question, UCEPROTECT is

a) not worth paying

b) should never be used by a production mailserver to block messages.

From the beginning there have been enterprising RBLs that are clearly overbroad, and offer to accept money. The money is not for getting off the list, it is always for something else so as to appear legitimate and a side effect is getting your domain off the list. This model is unethical at best, and is right up there with companies that snail mail over-priced domain renewal notices.

Avamander• 4 years ago

Actually no RBL alone should be used for decisive actions such as banning.

It's not UCEPROTECT either, big vendors like Cisco with their IronPorts are just as bad.

jspaetzel• 4 years ago

Any shared hosting provider is extremely susceptible to this type of issue and this type of list just doesn't work. It's a scam. There are lots of good blocklists, but there are also lots of bad ones like this.

When I worked with a company who ran email systems like this we'd always steer customers away from lists like this, in cases where we couldn't deliver mail because of it we blamed the other provider. This actually worked a lot of the time and the customer would wind up contacting the sender another way to let them know they had a problem, and fairly often they'd change lists.

Our standard messaging was something like, "Google and Microsoft are receiving our emails just fine, something is wrong with the receiving service"

huhtenberg2• 4 years ago

Or I can leave the current hosting company

Yep, that's the one.

If your hoster doesn't care about spam spreading from their IP space, you should take your mail server elsewhere. There's literally nothing to think about.

And if they do care about this issue, they are likely to be taking steps to remove any of their IP space from the blacklists, without being nudged.

PS.

I've been running a mail server for close to 20 years now and I do blacklist by /24 netblock on the second offense. This doesn't bounce emails though, just tags them as spam. So I had a quick look in the logs and Hetzner, Digital Ocean, OVH and LeaseWeb are all spamming a lot. LayerHost, Colo Crossing, Liquid Web, Host Winds and Servion are also close to the top. Anecdotal data, obviously, so caveat emptor and all that.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

When I first started monitoring spam connections years ago, it was almost always home cable+internet providers. They seem to have gotten the message and cleaned up thier acts.

As of last night, the number one source of spam for both the personal and company servers I maintain is Digital Ocean.

Which is a shame, because otherwise I'm a happy Digital Ocean customer. But because of this, I would never move any of my commercial projects there.

pixl972• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that home IPs have cleaned up their act, I think it is that no large email host accepts their email any longer so spammers have stopped sending from there.

derekzhouzhen10• 4 years ago

home cable+internet providers. They seem to have gotten the message and cleaned up thier acts.

By blocking outbound connection to port 25 outright. I don't want my VPS hosting company to "clean up" this way.

walrus0110• 4 years ago

Any hosting company where some random person can buy a VM for $5 on a credit card has this problem. Mostly I feel sorry for the support and staff at the hosting companies who do not have the time/manpower/resources to deal with it properly, and this is an intentional business decision by the people who own and run the companies.

It's a race to scraping the bottom of the barrel on per customer profit margin and pricing.

syshum• 4 years ago

/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???

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

Block registers don't deal with "justification".

If they did, what would be Google's justification for blocking senders that send too few emails?

huhtenberg2• 4 years ago

That seems excessive and abusive

Good thing it's my own mail server then, isn't it?

The practical reason is that virtually all Whois lookups of offending IPs return blocks of /24 or larger, so that's a reasonable default. Besides, as I said, this doesn't result in a "ban", just tags emails as spam and passes them through. At my scale an occasional false positive is not a big deal.

quags• 4 years ago

I have run my own mail server about as long, run an RBL, and a transactional mail service too. This is a hard line approach and blacklisting a /24 on a second offense that never expires just doesn't work long term but at least you are not completely blocking it and accepting it but as spam.

Lets be real there is spam coming from gmail and hotmail/outlook as well and places like abuseix specifically state they don't block these ranges. So the large providers get excused for clean up because they are too big. Sure blocking colo crossing probably won't get any one to complain, but Digital Ocean is probably going to get some collateral damage. For your own mail server fine, don't accept it, send to spam - but there is a reason real RBL lists are very careful to skip the big providers or make sure they expire. Spamcop always had the best method - expire when the spam stops. Does it keep getting listing? Keep it longer. Rspamd also has a good method where an RBL increases the score. The hard line approach gives gmail and microsoft a large share of the email market and hurts smaller providers when they are not held to the same standards as everyone else. If gmail emails start bouncing when they have a heavy spam hit, then maybe gmail users will change isps and help gmail clean up. These are two trillion dollar companies that also have spam problems.

As far as UCEprotect. Their level1 is actually reasonable, especially for spam traps. The timestamps easily allow for you to find exactly what the spam is from with the smtp response and time frame. Their scanning methods are less so. Dos prevention measures can get you listed there and are not valid. The level2/3 lists are utter shit.

judge2020• 4 years ago

I think the issue is that, short of customers running their own BGP routers and hosting their own subnet, anything smaller than a /24 assigned by the ISP is completely transparent to BGP databases and thus spam filters / IP reputation databases.

adrium2• 4 years ago

I have a similar experience: Some hosting providers / AS host shady stuff and I understand that VPS ranges end up on block lists quite easily.

I only block AS 4134 and AS 4837, some AS that host services like shodan, and aggressive crawlers like semrush.

Anything that sends packets to my server get ratelimited quickly. Still barely noticeable for occasional human interaction. I also started with /24, but I am now up to /12.

PS. By the way, has anyone ever seen spameri@tiscali.it in the logs? It shows up almost on a weekly basis as RCPT TO address from literally all over the world.

lbschenkel• 4 years ago

By the way, has anyone ever seen spameri@tiscali.it in the logs? It shows up almost on a weekly basis as RCPT TO address from literally all over the world.

Yes, I see it all the time in my logs.

robomartin2• 4 years ago

We recently ran into this issue and were forced to change email providers. It isn’t that our host didn’t care, it’s that it is almost impossible to play whack-a-mole with dozens of blacklists.

We have been with the same provider for 15 years, no problems, ever. It seems that email delivery started to become unreliable about six months ago. After repeated attempts to fix it we had no choice but to move elsewhere.

CliffStoll2• 4 years ago

Who'd you choose?

robomartin2• 4 years ago

Sorry, I've been so busy I haven't checked into HN in a while.

Zoho mail. Very happy with them so far. The webmail client is excellent. Deliver is fast and without problems. We usually setup users with multiple email addresses. Using email aliasing works great. In other words, you could receive email from you@example.com, sales@example.com and vendors@example.com. This only consumes one paid user account.

Ultimately, we decided to move email for three businesses to Zoho.

The prior host was GoDaddy. I can imagine someone saying something like: "You deserve the problems you had". My counter is that we've hosted email with GoDaddy for more than ten years. No problems at all. Rarely an issue. In my opinion, most of the GoDaddy hatred is truly unfounded. If you are running a more sophisticated infrastructure you need to go to something like Linode (which we use for exactly those applications) or something else.

In the last 6 to 12 months, something changed. Once reliable email delivery became questionable we had no choice but to make a move. They said they could not do much more than request the servers in question to be removed from the various blacklists. In other words, play whack-a-mole with that entire ecosystem. A loosing proposition. So, we moved our business. Perfectly sensible decision. No hate involved. We are buying a service that, in my opinion, was no-longer being offered. Done deal.

sylware• 4 years ago

I run my own email server, and I have _really_ a pb with smtp servers using spamhaus block lists. Ofc, to "whitelist" your IP with spamhaus (some shady andoran/swiss mafia), you must use a javascript only web engine based web browsers (I don't and I shoud not have to) in order to contact spamhaus. If this is a "chat" with their ppl, where is their IRC server? If I have to pay something out of this, this will be a lawyer to deal with the admins of such smtp servers.

kazinator3• 4 years ago

My hosting company is competitively priced, is fast, and has served me well for many years.

... attributes which they achieve by (1) selling services to anyone and anyone and (2) not dedicating any resources to fighting spam.

So you got what you pay for.

derekzhouzhen10• 4 years ago

I don't want my hosting company to dictate what I can do and what I can't do. I don't spam, but I won't hold my moral standard to everyone else.

autoexec10• 4 years ago

Your hosting company is free to allow all the spam they want to leave their network and every other ISP on the planet is free to drop all traffic from your irresponsible hosting company's IP space. freedom sure is nice.

prepend• 4 years ago

I guess another option is to sue the blacklist operator for inappropriately including him. Or sending some legal sounding letter threatening suit.

I found some old lawsuits [0] that got injunctions and even damages awarded from being included in black lists.

I hate how the big tech customer nonsupport is bleeding into small firms attitude. “Sorry, you did nothing wrong but might one day so get fucked.” is really not something that should happen very much.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051228/1349229.shtml

TillE• 4 years ago

Email is a fundamentally broken protocol which has become less and less important, I don't really get the point of running your own server except as a technical exercise.

Set up your email wherever is convenient, encrypt stuff that matters, and move as much communication as possible elsewhere.

DrBoring• 4 years ago

But where is elsewhere?

dredmorbius4• 4 years ago

Postal, as a backstop. The cost is a feature.

Network-specific messaging tools are another option. I strongly prefer open protocols.

The concept that anyone anywhere can intrude on anyone anywhere else at no financial or reputational cost is ultimately flawed. It works only so long as those with that access are few in number, generally of mutual interest, and act in a largely principled manner.

As numbers increase, and levels of interest and level of principles fall, the system will collapse.

Usenet was the first such network to fall to this dynamic. Email is well on its way. Telephony is into its first years of general intolerability (any direct-dialed universal access, wired or otherwise). Facebook faces this threat less through its lack of filters than the defection of high-affinity users.

Postal mail has its own issues with quality, but the associated costs do in fact impose a minimum bar to malicious content.

1over137• 4 years ago

All the 'elsewheres' are non-federated, centrally controlled, and/or corporate. No thanks.

jijji• 4 years ago

this is the first time that I've ever heard of a email blacklist provider offering to remove an IP from their database if you pay a monthly fee... it sounds like extortion.

karmicthreat• 4 years ago

I think many RBLs started out with good intentions. But it does feel like like many of them have shifted to pure grift. Pay for "priority" review definitely has negatively impacted this. UCEPROTECTL3 especially feels like an extortion attempt similar to the threatening domain renewal scams. But I've never notice any outgoing email from my services being blocked by it. So it just goes in the crank file.

Really we probably need some sort of anti-RBL system. To keep good actors honest and force bad actors out of business.

istillwritecode2• 4 years ago

If you start a new mail server in 2022 (or migrate from a previous address), you have to apply to be whitelisted by outlook.com and the many domains owned by Microsoft. They no longer accept mail from servers they haven't seen before. Companies such as google, microsoft, and facebook would rather that email died, and are actively working to destroy it through neglect, so that people will shift their messaging to proprietary networks they happen to own. Email has problems - spam being one of them, but it's as potentially important as IP routing itself, and we should work to preserve it.

thaumaturgy7• 4 years ago

They no longer accept mail from servers they haven't seen before.

Interesting. This tracks with my experiences too, but is there a good source for this that I can reference in the future?

I got out of hosting email last year entirely because of intractable deliverability problems with the big three: Google, Microsoft, and Comcast. Comcast's issues mostly appeared intermittent and the result of incompetence. Google and Microsoft have clearly been competing to see who can kill small email service providers the fastest.

lytefm4• 4 years ago

I contacted Microsoft, actually received an answer from them and got an IP unblocked.

Google can be tough though. If their Algorithms don't like you, good look.

I was responsible for a new IP/Email setup and while all other relevant providers liked our mail and Google Postmaster tools didn't show anything bad, all our mail went to Spam in GMail. I found out why when even mails from completely different senders would usually go to Inbox but hit Spam once our Website or email was included:

Despite showing it as "high reputation", GMail must have considered it as utter trash. Changed to a different, older domain and all has been fine since.

eps• 4 years ago

Another fascinating fact is that forwarding Outlook spam to abuse@outlook.com will get you shitcanned ... as a spammer!

You can't make this up. They pass all abuse reports throuh their spam filter and this affects your server's reputation. Then at some point they start rejecting emails from you with a 5xx code that stands for "your IP is on our blacklist". Contacting "Hotmail sender support" will yield "We see no problems on our end, kindly fuck off". You have to then go through a ritual of summoning a manager, taking anywhere from 2 to 5 days, at which point they will say "we put a mitigation in place, will take up to 48 hours to propagate", but it works right away. If it doesn't, it means that they mistyped your server address and the next chance to ask them to fix this will be, you guessed it, in 48 hours. So a week of bounces in total.

Ran into this 3 times in a course of a year, then took a closer look at the logs and - yep - in all three cases it was triggered by sending a report to abuse@outlook.com.

It's just such a magnifecent clusterfuck it's jaw-dropping.

cpncrunch• 4 years ago

It's actually not that big of a problem. I moved to a new server with a different IP last year, and also the year before, and as long as you have SPF, DMARC, DKIM and reverse DNS set up, generally everything works. I think I just had to got whitelisted from one or two.

A few years ago I did have major problems with hotmail and icloud, but recently it doesn't seem to be an issue. I think I didn't have DKIM set up when I was having problems. I have noticed that google will auto-junk your email if you don't have SPF, DMARC and DKIM set up, and you must set DMARC to "reject".

rsync6• 4 years ago

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 interest in doing so). So if you're not wasting an entire /24 (we only need ~10 IPs at this location) you're in danger of this misclassification.

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.

Unbelievable.

vorpalhex5• 4 years ago

We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them.

You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself.

Even if it's not required by the letter of the law, you should add it.

As an example: Amazon automatically opted me into an "alert" when a wishlist I viewed had a new viewer. Since it's an "alert" and a "business communication" it has no unsubscribe. This is spam - this is an ad hidden as a notification.

kazinator3• 4 years ago

Though that may be a nice opinion, your ISP has no business dictating that to you.

thaumaturgy7• 4 years ago

~rsync runs a storage service for offsite backups. You think they should add a one-click "unsubscribe" link to service alerts?

Shared404• 4 years ago

For rsync however, it seems more likely that it's instead things like disc quota or expiring service.

At least based on my understanding of rsync-the-company and rsync-the-hn-commenter.

rsync6• 4 years ago

"You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself."

What would that even look like ?

You're a paying customer of a service - they charge you every month - and you use that service ~daily ... and then you unsubscribe to emails ...

So then what ?

We just keep taking your money and when the service fails or there is an outage or critical notification we ... just don't send it ?

dredmorbius4• 4 years ago

Those unsubscribe links should be there, for several reasons.

- The service-based economy means that entities (individuals and businesses) have numerous relationships. For the typical individual the number of password-based accounts crossed the 100 threshold years ago, at a doubling rate of every 2--3 years.

- Responsibilities can be transferred. The person who signed up for your service 5 years ago may no longer be at the company.

- List purging is a Real Thing. A few years back I'd worked for an organisation that had ... numerous relationships ... with individuals and corporations. These received regular email messages. Nominally, requested. Included amongst these was a major Wall Street financial firm whose implosion years earlier hit lead news and headlines worldwide. Despite not existing for years, there remained hundreds if not thousands of addresses being sent email on a regular ongoing basis.

- Mail can be forwarded. It's quite possible that you're sending mail to one address that is is being forwarded, manually or automatically, to others. This raises issues in unsubscribe requests, but might at the least be an opportunity to reach out to your customer to clarify the situation.

- I don't know if revisiting email contact approval on a regular basis (say once every year or two) is yet a recommended practice, but I'd strongly suggest that it be so.

Your hat may be less blisteringly white than you presume.

contravariant• 4 years ago

I've also had email from the wrong person delivered to me some times. One company in particular kept sending updates for a service I had no way of using. An unsubscribe link would have been handy, though confirming email addresses before linking them to an account would also be a good idea, probably.

rsync6• 4 years ago

Everything you've said makes perfect sense - for a contact management function.

We have that. You can change contact info, set owner/technical/emergency contacts, alert thresholds, etc.

But unsubscribe means something totally different:

When I click on unsubscribe I want it to be the end of all communications. Period.

In this case, that makes no sense. Ceasing communications for all purposes implies service cancellation and, in our case, service cancellation implies a human interaction confirming data destruction.

How would we confirm data destruction for your implied cancellation if no further contact is permitted ?

You, and the blacklist operators, have become so jaded by the abuse you've suffered that you've forgotten that legitimate, paid services exist. I'm sorry.

newaccount742• 4 years ago

I strongly disagree. There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email.

All emails should of course contain enough information to make it clear who the message is from, why the message is being sent, and who it was sent to.

But there is no point in adding unsubscribe links to messages and notifications that are essential to the service.

I mean, what are you going to do if the user accidentally clicks "unsubscribe", and then a payment doesn't go through? Should you just cancel their account without informing them? That's absurd.

I'd be really pissed if eg. my backups were deleted because I accidentally unsubscribed from emails from a cloud service provider.

Silhouette14• 4 years ago

Those unsubscribe links should be there, for several reasons.

In some jurisdictions there is information that businesses are legally required to provide to their customers in a permanent form and email is the conventional (and potentially the only) way of satisfying that requirement.

IMHO, it is not helpful for anyone to have a system where recipients may not understand this and may treat that mail as spam, yet businesses are compelled to send it anyway.

RunSet3• 4 years ago

I treat every unsubscribe link as though it read "click here to confirm your email address is live and being used by a human being so it will command a higher value when we resell it".

If I don't like an email I never unsub. I add it to the spam filter.

cge2• 4 years ago

Mail may also be simply going to the completely wrong address, for some reason, and there needs to be some way to ask that this be corrected without requiring credentials that the recipient might not have. If not an unsubscribe link, then at least a reply-to address that actually works, or some way to handle a mistake.

I had one email address that for some reason often ended up being mistakenly used for other people, and ended up enormously frustrated by the usual combinations of no unsubscribe links, no-reply senders, and notes that any changes should be made by logging in. In the worst case, the US Department of Education, for several years, sent the address private personal and financial details about a complete stranger at a university with student loans. There was no way for me to unsubscribe, and no monitored address to reply to: in their view, they were important emails for the recipient, and they were, but I was not the intended recipient at all.

wl6• 4 years ago

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 address is ridiculous. "Mandatory communication" with a company I've never dealt with gets flagged as spam.

derefr• 4 years ago

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 links unilaterally to all email communications.

Remember, unsub links are machine-automatable; Gmail at least offers to follow any embedded unsubscribe links for you if you mark a message as spam. (Which, with hotkeys enabled, is one accidental keypress away.)

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 they've been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill?

If it's clear that "bills you need to react to or your power will be shut off" shouldn't have an unsubscribe link, then clearly there's some sort of line that must be drawn somewhere.

(Note, I'm not arguing against the use of "Manage your Mail Preferences" links in these cases — the kind that act as magic sign-in links and take you directly to a page on which you can un-check a "mail me about X" checkbox. It makes sense to include those. I'm just arguing specifically against unilaterally including "Unsubscribe" links — the kind where following the link unsubscribes you with no further confirmation needed.)

ratww3• 4 years ago

Yep. I had to file a GDPR complaint to get an airline to stop sending me "letters from the CEO" and other COVID-related reports that never mattered to me.

I never flew with them but somehow they still sent ads disguised as reassuring messages every other week.

Support constantly denied help, since I was never a customer. Only a GDPR complaint solved it.

bo10245• 4 years ago

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.'

thaumaturgy7• 4 years ago

FWIW, Mailgun has worked pretty well for me in the past as an alternative to handling delivery myself.

You might not be able to go this route if your customers have some expectations about how your email is handled, in which case this recommendation is here for anyone else that might read this and need another thing to try.

zamadatix4• 4 years ago

The inability to generate IP reputation smaller than a /24 is inherent to the way internet routing works. Nothing smaller than a /24 can be publicly assigned or advertised to prevent the route table from becoming too bloated. On IPv6 the smallest advertise able block is a /48 for the same reason. Privately managed assignments in shared or further split subnets aren't publicly visible, verifiable, or accountable to anything but the organization owning and advertising the /24 (or larger).

As such the reputation score of a subnet is the reputation of the entity advertising itself as publicly controlling and maintaining that network, not the reputation of individual sub entities inside that subnet (which is known only to the controlling entity). If that entity is constantly allowing bad actors onto their block then that block is considered poor reputation.

the_biot• 4 years ago

The inability to generate IP reputation smaller than a /24 is inherent to the way internet routing works.

Nonsense. SMTP is not internet routing, and there is no reason at all why some "reputation" system should be constrained by the same /24 limit that the global routing table ended up with.

I find it telling that these "reputation" outfits tend to serve up this sort of poor excuse to justify their businesses; whereas they're often plain old protection rackets. Like the one described in the article clearly is. They take money to solve the problem they created!

smf8• 4 years ago

I'm the Abusix engineer in question (and actually the architect of the system in question), and you're being somewhat "economical" with what actually happened here.

Here's the actual chain of events in question:

- You recently switched ISPs and that meant you moved to a new IP block.

- The IP block in question is owned by Hurricane Internet and unfortunately contains a host which persistently sends out a lot of junk (https://lookup.abusix.com/search?q=216.218.240.46)

- Without going into massive details on how our infra works, but when we have the most serious level of listing (e.g. hitting our most secure traps as in this case), we treat the same /24 more aggressively than we normally would (because of things like snoeshoe spam that would normally spread traffic across a wide range of IPs).

We use /24s only where we cannot determine different ownership of the IPs by looking at the abuse contact registered at the RIR e.g. if the IPs are different contacts then we don't bundle them into the same bucket. In this case Hurricane Internet owns the entire range, so the /24 is used.

We do this because there is no other way to do it that isn't completely abuseable by a bad actor e.g. rDNS is completely trivial to forge and to claim multiple fake entities. If someone has a fool-proof way to do this, then I'm all ears.

Then we get to your failings in this case:

- You don't have proper, working bounce handling.

You were repeatedly sending mail to an old customer and we were rejecting 100% of the email you sent to that address - stating that you should stop sending to it in the rejection message. We always reject traffic on traps we are building so that bounce handling removes them automatically over time.

- You decided to send a marketing message to a bunch of users, including to the address described above "We (rsync.net) are experimenting with a lifetime prepayment option". This message provided no List-Unsubscribe option at all, so I could not unsubscribe it without exposing the trap to your engineer (which is my primary concern as it takes years to build traps properly).

- Your engineer said to me "we took down 600 old accounts and are reviewing our contact policies going forward" and "there are still plenty of other customers who are listed generically as bouncing so we will have work to do here".

That tells me that you knew that you were sending to old accounts and that your bounce handling was either not great or non-existent.

I take our role very seriously and I and my team go out of our way to help anyone who finds themselves listed by providing evidence and advice and we always try to find a good resolution for all legitimate senders.

That is exactly what I did here with your engineer, the problem is resolved as the specific account was removed and you know now what you were doing wrong and how to fix it so that it never happens again.

Your engineer was appreciative and I said if there are any further issues in the meantime whilst you fix things on your end, then we would help by exempting your traffic whilst you did those changes.

I can't see how we could have done anything more in this case.

On our website, we provide blog posts and videos, we take part in conferences and workshops to give advice on how to do things properly so you never have blocklisting issues.

I can easily summarise here what everyone should do to avoid issues:

- Have proper rDNS for your sending IPs that is part of your administrative domain (e.g. don't use your providers generic rDNS that contains the entire IP in the hostname). If someone visits the domain name, make sure there is a website present that has contact details as a minimum.

- Make sure your abuse@domain and postmaster@domain accounts actually go to a responsible person.

- If you send any marketing mail at all, make sure it has a working List-Unsubscribe header (preferably HTTP that allows someone to unsubscribe without having to contact you). Important note: If you use a mailto: unsubscribe, then I cannot unsubscribe a trap, even if I wanted to.

- Make sure you have working bounce handling. If you repeatedly send to an account and it either bounces or is hard rejected, then you need to stop sending to it and mark it as bad. No excuses.

- Don't send to addresses where you have not contacted them or had any interaction at all for > 1 year. If you haven't kept in touch with your customers, then that is on you.

- If you have a web form that when submitted, sends a message to an external user, then you MUST a) validate all of the input fields and disallow URLs unless the field required it and b) prevent automated submission via the use of a CAPTCHA.

- When collecting email addresses for mailing lists, always use confirm opt-in e.g. send a message containing a link that they have to click to activate the subscription. Do not send any further messages to them until this has been completed.

- Make sure you separate IP addresses being used for outbound mail from those used for outbound NAT pool. Block outbound port 25 from the NAT pools and make your firewall notify you of any port 25 activity from any hosts as this could indicate they are infected.

- When provisioning a new mail server IP, don't send more than 30 messages per minute (e.g. 0.5 messages/sec) for the first day and then increase the volume over the following week.

I'm sure some will disagree with some of these, but I guarantee that if you follow all of these, then you'll never have an issue with a blocklist like ours.

I hope this helps.

xist2• 4 years ago

As a former admin of an isp & running saas apps I applaud you greatly for your approach. Some people may find these approaches are "heavy handed" but the reality this is what life is like in 2022 with email. Should we need to do this? Definitely not, but it's an arms race and each company sending email has to up their game - to both be compliant in getting email accepted, and to foster a healthy relationship with customers.

The comment about "lifetime prepayment option" is exactly something that MUST have an unsubscribe option to it. I understand everyone is trying to increase business, but this is something @rsync missed mentioning, insisting you don't need one.

Bollocks.

MauranKilom• 4 years ago

Incredibly insightful, thank you for taking the time to post this!

- Don't send to addresses where you have not contacted them or had any interaction at all for > 1 year. If you haven't kept in touch with your customers, then that is on you.

That seems odd though. "Keeping in touch" in regular intervals is exactly the kind of thing customers may want to unsubscribe from, so a working unsubscribe function means there are customers where I cannot keep in touch. How is that on me? That means I can't send e.g. a password reset email to them if they try to log in two years later?

burnished2• 4 years ago

Great response, and I was just wondering what went into sending email.

One question though, what do you mean by 'traps'? I feel like I'm missing some interesting context

kevincox2• 4 years ago

make sure it has a working List-Unsubscribe header (preferably HTTP that allows someone to unsubscribe without having to contact you). Important note: If you use a mailto: unsubscribe, then I cannot unsubscribe a trap, even if I wanted to.

This is very interesting to me. Could you elaborate further?

- Some providers (IIRC outlook being the main one) only support mailto: and most prefer it. I have never seen advice that you "must" provide HTTP before.

- What do you mean by unsubscribe without contacting me? Isn't HTTP or SMTP just as much contacting me?

- Why can't you unsubscribe mailto: even if you wanted to? Earlier you hinted that it may have to do with revealing the trap, but while a HTTP url may not directly include the trap address it would be linked anyways. (Otherwise how would the unsubscribe work?)

Thanks for all the valuable insights. It does sound like you are taking a responsible approach here.

kevincox2• 4 years ago

One other question. How do you manage domain based reputation vs IP reputation. I'm trying to get by running a service off of Cloud provider IPs and they may rotate from time to time as VPSs rotate. Part of me feels that once my domain has enough reputation it should be fine. It does seem like some of the big providers work like this (Google seems to trust me now from any IP) but it seems that a lot of smaller providers rely on blacklists more as they don't see as much traffic to build reputation. How do blacklists handle domain reputation?

rsync6• 4 years ago

"- Your engineer said to me "we took down 600 old accounts and are reviewing our contact policies going forward" and "there are still plenty of other customers who are listed generically as bouncing so we will have work to do here"."

(snip)

"That tells me that you knew that you were sending to old accounts and that your bounce handling was either not great or non-existent."

Yes, that is exactly right.

I have instructed everyone to be as liberal and forgiving of non-payment and failed contact as possible. These people, who were paying customers, have data stored here for safekeeping and we're not going to trash it because we haven't heard from them in 3 months or their email bounced.

I can give you hours of stories of customers who came back from military deployment, came back from depression, came back from prison, came back from financial ruin ... that contacted us, beyond all hope, to see if we still had their account. And we did.

After 21 years of doing this are there a few hundred accounts that we are giving extreme benefit of the doubt to ? There certainly are.

Bottom line: our duty of safeguarding customer data trumps this weeks fashionable spam heuristics.

bendbro• 4 years ago

What is "blicklisting"? A misspelling?

berkut• 4 years ago

Very likely...

Unless they're South African :)

mjrpes4• 4 years ago

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 the spam folder, and companies using email firewall products would blacklist me, with an IT Dept too inept to fix it.

The solution was to pay a small fee and proxy all outbound email through a transactional SMTP sender, like Postmark or Mailgun. It's easy to do, with one line of code in Postfix. You can be selective, and only proxy emails sent to certain troublesome domains. If you try an email provider and it's not working out, it's one line of code to change to another provider.

This allows me to still manage nearly all aspects of hosting my email server and control my email data, while not dealing with deliverability issues. I use Postmark and I have not dealt with a deliverability issue in two years.

Silhouette14• 4 years ago

While I am happy for you that you have found a solution, the solution you found is symptomatic of a very dangerous situation: it is increasingly impossible for individuals or SMEs to use essential online facilities like sending messages or transferring money reliably unless they use a broker service as an intermediary. We are allowing small numbers of tech firms to take control of vital functionality that should be using open, standardised protocols in a decentralised way. This leaves everyone who isn't big enough to run their own implementation that others can't afford to ignore beholden to those brokers and subject to arbitrary charges and/or denial of service.

YPCrumble• 4 years ago

I agree completely with this, but the one problem is that you haven’t addressed how we control spam without these “trusted” intermediaries. “Trusted” here meaning that they aren’t spammers.

SturgeonsLaw• 4 years ago

This is the real value of cryptocurrencies. Yes, I know HN doesn't like them, yes there's a bunch of get-rich-quick bros and scammers out there, please try and separate the grift from the tech and consider how vital it is that people are able to control their finances without a third party having the ultimate say as to whether a transaction takes place or not.

kbenson2• 4 years ago

This is just the internet moving to match the real world. In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you. For areas where the general public needs to interact, third party intermediary services spring up to fill this need.

This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by name to put it on your account, and instead for credit purchases you use a credit card company which acts as an intermediary and smooths problems over on both sides, and refuses to work with stores and people that are untrustworthy.

This is why there are mailing list (mass email) services and why mail servers allow them. They keep their customers working within the accepted bounds (they ensure removal works and fire clients that abuse), and this allows mass email for accepted reasons while still being able to come down hard in random exploited servers/accounts.

This is why big email services are very selective about what servers they talk to. I work at an ISP where our main outbound mail servers are on IPs that we try not to change because they've got decades of reputation attached. Even so, we recently brought up two new servers for email forwards, and shifted a small percentage of our mail queue traffic to them and ramped it up over a couple weeks, and that seemed to work "warming them up" to the likes of Gmail and yahoo, etc. It used to be there were lists of mail operators you could be part of and you could use reputation within that to get them to be lenient with you when you started. These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.

jart3• 4 years ago

The open internet is dead. Spammers, fraudsters, and abusers have killed it. I can see how you might hate me, but I only speak the truth. Once upon a time the Internet consisted of a bunch of anonymous university students and u.s. government, Bell, IBM, etc. employees doing unfettered research. Today the Internet consists of anonymous grifters trying to squeeze a buck out of you any way they can.

tinus_hn• 4 years ago

The flip side is that before, when the rules were lax and everybody could send email, everyone would get at least 10 spam mails every day, more if your address was online somewhere. Where now most people get one a week.

js2• 4 years ago

How do you know whether your mail is going through? I can understand for messages that bounce, but how about mails that are silently dropped or end up in spam folders?

noduerme10• 4 years ago

In our case it's quickly obvious since our server sends verification codes when people sign up for online accounts or change their passwords. We'll see a pattern of customer complaints from certain mail services within a day of being on any major blacklist.

mjrpes4• 4 years ago

I can never know for sure if email is avoiding the spam folder, but everything tells me if it does happen, it's quite rare now.

First, I will send emails to test accounts I have set up with major email providers (gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc). I used to do this often, but they have all been going to the inbox on my last few tests, so I haven't done this recently.

Second, is feedback I get from recipients. When I send an email and ask for a reply, I'll get a reply. I also used to hear a few times a month, "sorry for the delay. I found your email in my spam folder!". This has gone away.

johnklos2• 4 years ago

Honestly, we usually find out after communication has failed and some other form of communication is used.

It's usually worthwhile to remind businesses that when they use "free" services like privacy-paid outlook.com and Gmail, they'll get what they pay for, and if their communications really matter, they should find proper email providers.

noduerme10• 4 years ago

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 another solution besides changing IPs, using a paid sender, or filling out whitelist requests into the void: Get your legal department involved. We have repeatedly been taken off various public and private blacklists by having lawyers do their job. Once we went this path, it was like magic. Same day responses from those companies, and we haven't been on any blacklists for a couple of years.

walrus0110• 4 years ago

Not everyone can spend $500 on lawyer billable hours per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations.

I also think that the likelihood of success in sending legal threats to somebody that demand they accept your SMTP traffic will not stand up in court, if you ever escalated it that far.

As somebody who runs postfix MX on the receiving side of things, I can guarantee you that the day I receive a legal threat from some unknown third party with which I don't have a pre-existing business/contract relationship, demanding that I accept their email, is the day that I blacklist their entire organization and tell them "okay, I'll await service of your statement of claim".

You actually think that the best answer to a network engineering problem is to make legal threats at third party ISPs? Companies with which you don't have a signed service order contract and/or master services agreement?

You say you're a mid sized company. I think you're running a huge legal risk of angering a Comcast or AT&T size entity that has much deeper pockets and legal resources than you. The day that one of those giants calls you out on your bluff is going to be very expensive.

On an ISP-to-ISP relationship level, this is not how you solve SMTP flow traffic problems. I can tell you that if I went to a NANOG conference representing my AS and proudly told other people "oh yeah, we've started sending threats from our lawyers to $OTHERISP1 and $OTHERISP2 because they won't take our mail traffic", that I would quickly be treated as a pariah.

bo10245• 4 years ago

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)?

jasode• 4 years ago

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?

wolverine8762• 4 years ago

Get your legal department involved.

Excellent idea, thank you.

noduerme10• 4 years ago

Too late to edit my original post, but I want to address a few questions that were brought up by several people.

1. I don't know how the lawyers worded the letters. Obviously it's not illegal for a host to block inbound mail. But clearly the legal team made someone look more closely at our particular case. If you're not doing anything nefarious, it's easy for someone mid-level to clear you off a blacklist if they want to. The company I work for isn't a household name outside a few states, but it's large and respectable enough that getting a cursory glance from someone with the power to say "take them off the blacklist" is probably enough.

2. We've had these IPs for > 5 years. Our reverse DNS, DKIM, SPF are all in order. The mail comes from the same IPs as the company's main website/app services. The company uses Constant Contact for marketing emails, so our outbound server only sends things like receipts for purchases, service agreements, confirmations of renewal/cancellation, verification codes for login (password reset / new signup / new device), and intra-company mail which sometimes goes to employees' personal addresses. Being able to firmly state that we never send marketing off this server, and we regularly assess exim logs and we are sure we've never been hijacked has usually gotten good results, even without lawyers.

3. When we first got these IPs, around 2015, there were more problems. I don't know who they belonged to before. For the first year it was whack-a-mole with the blacklists. But truthfully, I've never had a problem personally getting us taken off any of the public blacklists shown on mxtoolbox. It's the private blacklists of mail providers like AT&T, Comcast and AOL that caused repeated issues. There's no public way to check if you're on these, and as far as I can tell their removal forms are black holes. The removal form for AT&T looks like it hasn't been updated since the '90s, and I've never received even an automated response from using it.

4. We did, for awhile, advise customers to get other email addresses. Unfortunately, the customers with an @comcast or @att account are also probably the least tech-savvy. It's just not feasible to have customers calling their local retail outlet and having a manager spend an hour trying to walk them through why they didn't get their signup verification code, and three days later this bubbles up to corporate and finally to me. And it isn't a good look for us as a company to say "sorry, Comcast doesn't like us for some reason."

5. For awhile we had customers write to Comcast and AT&T asking why they were bouncing important emails from us. Overall this had basically no effect. The customers would get back automated emails telling them how to configure Outlook. However, one such customer was a lawyer who I ended up corresponding with personally (through my gmail account, since he couldn't get my emails), who got such a bug up his butt about it that he seemed to get AT&T to unblock us, which only lasted a month or so. This was where I got the idea to approach the CEO about unleashing the legal department.

6. Variations of "Don't waste $500/hr. on a lawyer". IMHO lawyers are pretty terrible to have against you, and pretty awesome to have on your side. I'm glad I work for a company whose philosophy is to keep as much of our infrastructure as possible in-house, and which also refuses to pony up something that feels like a ransom, even if it would be more expedient. I personally don't have $500/hr. to pay a lawyer, and it would be a much worse uphill battle for a sole proprietor or small company these days trying to manage their own email server than it was ten years ago, or is now even with the backing of a larger company. But it's important to us that we don't get pushed around by big providers, and retain as much autonomy as possible in our business dealings with customers. That's part of the philosophy I brought to the company, it's why we run dedicated hardware, and I'm the one who pushed to spend the money to have the lawyers get involved. If more mid-sized companies took this approach, and if other IT leads pushed for running their own metal and their own mailservers (granted, yeah, it's an endless pain in the ass), then big email providers would be forced to actually take things on a case by case basis the way they did ten years ago, rather than block blacklisting whole /24s with the assumption that every company and individual will eventually cave and be forced into their monopoly. So to whoever says that decline is inevitable, save your money, lawyers suck, etc, without offering any positive solutions: you're welcome.

Wolfenstein98k• 4 years ago

Classic example of regulatory burden in action. Any firm small enough to not have a legal team can't compete.

Edit; to be clear I'm not saying this results from some legislation, although you could make that case. Just that scale has many benefits and the principle of regulatory burden obtains!

TedDoesntTalk• 4 years ago

I did not even know services like Postmark and Mailgun solved this problem. Thank you!

mjrpes4• 4 years ago

To be clear, Postfix is the Open Source Linux software for sending email. In a perfect world, Postfix would be all you need for sending.

Providers like Postmark and Mailgun let you forward and send email through them. Essentially, you are paying these companies to deal with IP address reputation management and ensure high deliverability.

suzzer99• 4 years ago

My Dad still sends all emails to my main address and my gmail address, due to the occasional spat between netzero and godaddy that would block emails to my main address.

AviationAtom• 4 years ago

I was flabbergasted that relaying their mail through a service that does high volume, and enforces abuse policies, wasn't one of his listed options. As the Internet has become, due to rampant spamming, it's become best to just outsource mail relaying.

makecheck• 4 years ago

The funny thing about that work-around is, what stops spammers from doing it either?

dqv3• 4 years ago

A spammer is going to get blocked and then have to send another letter ad infinitum. It's not financially feasible to do that. The respondent should also have evidence available to prove that the spammer is acting in bad faith (if they don't, then maybe they should get some before initiating a block).

dataflow• 4 years ago

and control my email data

Are you though? Aren't you giving your outbound emails to Postmark or Mailgun in that case?

mjrpes4• 4 years ago

Yes, Postmark keeps a 45 day history of emails for user reporting. After that it's deleted:

https://postmarkapp.com/eu-privacy#security-and-privacy

It's a decision I am fine with. Others may not be.

JohnTHaller2• 4 years ago

I've had a few issues with Mailgun getting blocked over the years. Especially with Hotmail/Outlook.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

through a transactional SMTP sender, like Postmark or Mailgun.

... cheapest is $10/month. Not paying that for my meager email traffic. Are there other options for personal domains?

watchdogtimer• 4 years ago

I've been using the free tier at MailJet to relay mail for my server for several years and have had few problems. Several others offer free tiers too (SendinBlue, etc.)

maccolgan• 4 years ago

AWS SES

benjojo12• 4 years ago

My personal experience with UCEPROTECT was that they had blacklisted 2 or 3 IPs in my /24 that were not routed to anything, nor had they ever been routed to anything, a fresh new block from RIPE NCC too.

Of course they offered to unblacklist them in exchange for payment, or wait.

Waited 2 weeks and they dropped off. I've yet to hear about anyone using their DNSBL for anything serious in 2020/2021/2022

I only knew about the listings because a monitoring service emailed me about it.

zinekeller• 4 years ago

a fresh new block from RIPE NCC too

While I personally don't use UCE (and personally think that they're not good at what they're doing), unless you've get that IP range before 2012, I doubt it's a new one. Many spammers do often exploit RIPE's unallocated IPs for their spamming operations (either using BGP hijacking or just asking RIPE nicely for a range), which unfortunately is a perennial problem.

bhauer• 4 years ago

This has become bad enough that operators of personal mail servers are put into no-win situations and generally give up.

Either we can concede defeat and relay personal correspondence email through a commercial service or we can just accept that some recipients will not receive our emails.

I've adopted the latter stance because I don't operate a business that uses my personal mail server and therefore have the luxury of not caring a whole lot. My stance is that if a recipient is using an email service that blocks me for no good reason, they don't want to receive my email. They can complain to their service provider if they choose to. In a few cases, I've asked them to complain to their service provider and have seen some minor corrective action. But that's pretty rare.

yosamino2• 4 years ago

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 reason you are being banned.

The first order of business is of course to complain to your hosting provider. Nobody wants spammers on their networks - but if they do: then this is kind of exactly the reason for this list. The policy describes in detail what made it possible for this netblock to end up on the list, that should be enough for them to take action either pre-emptively or by notifying their offending customer, and if neccessary kicking them off the network.

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.

I have had success doing this even at some larger ISPs, where you would expect this to be more difficult.

I very much enjoy these blocklists - simple, transparent. Loads better than the kafkaesk black holes that are the major mail providers who barely care, and who do not give you easy recourse if you are mistakenly blocked.

[0] https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5

cure• 4 years ago

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!

teekert• 4 years ago

Would be nice if ipv6 would fix this. This is also the reason I stopped self-hosting email, despite some nice benefits.

gorgoiler• 4 years ago

Can anyone here (the author?) recommend a one-stop-shop script for checking ones IP address / prefixes against these blacklists, ordered by severity?

neilv• 4 years ago

The US federal government should tackle huge email account providers that effectively (by accident or design) use anti-spam as a pretext to sabotage self-hosted email.

scarface745• 4 years ago

Yes because the government involved in technology always makes things better as I click on “allow cookies” on every damn website.

gog2• 4 years ago

Punishing anti-competitive measures doesn't have to be always complicated.

"Allow cookies" modals are horrible but GDPR gives people in the EU rights to be forgotten and not contacted in the future. Reminding companies about GDPR regulations works very well.

vmception• 4 years ago

Extortion rackets

jrochkind1• 4 years ago

That you can pay them to get off the blacklist does sound rather like a protection racket. Am I missing anything?

basilgohar2• 4 years ago

This has literally just recently (re-)become an issue for me because after a good year or so of not being blocked, several emails from my server started getting filtered as spam by both Google and then just being outright blocked by both Google and Microsoft. When I got through Microsoft's steps to unblock, after several days and steps, they send me the message that actually my IP is not blocked.

Google's recent message was more helpful - apparently forwarding emails from the accounts I setup for my kids to my wife's Gmail account triggered some obscure rule that ruined my server's reputation with Google, and I think Google & Microsoft collaborate because the issues cropped up within a week of each other.

The interesting thing was I discovered the Outlook issue by trying to reply to an email sent from an Outlook customer. Yes, my reply to an Outlook customer's email to me was blocked because of my server's reputation.

To be clear, I run no mailing lists nor solicit any business with my email server. I use it for personal use only and my consulting work which involves know contacts. The forwarding I spoke of before is solely to our own personal accounts.

I use Mail-In-A-Box, for what it's worth, on a Linode VPS.

gog2• 4 years ago

How did you contact Google and Microsoft regarding deliverability issues?

pteraspidomorph3• 4 years ago

Microsoft:

1. Set up on https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/

2. Read everything at https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/

3. Make sure everything is fixed, then use the link to the form hidden under Troubleshooting > "Sender services, tools, and issue submission" (the link's label is "here") to contact support. Make sure all fields are provided, including a website. It may take a few days to get a response. You may have to try multiple times until someone actually helps you.

Google:

Pray

Ansil849• 4 years ago

Other customers within this range did not care about their security and got hacked, started spamming, or were even attacking others, while your provider has possibly not even noticed that there is a serious problem. We are sorry for you, but you have chosen a provider not acting fast enough on abusers.

What a ridiculously hostile message. Just because a website or mail server or whatever they are talking about got compromised does not mean that the owner "did not care about their security". This sounds like a case of a blocklist operator on a power trip, talking down to people.

cmroanirgo• 4 years ago

From the article:

If my understanding of the law is correct, spamming is legal, albeit immoral

But the FTC takes a rather clear stance (at least in my eyes) [0]:

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.
Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated*

On top of that there's GDPR [1]:

After the GDPR passed, some people said it would be “the end of email marketing” or “the end of spam.” But it will be neither. Spam has always been outlawed or against the terms of use of most email providers. Those who send unsolicited or malicious mass emails will probably continue to send them. Did your spam folder dry up after May 25, 2018, when the GDPR took effect?

So, it seems the laws are in place, it's just that the jungle of unwanted & unsolicited email continues. It sucks when it's your server that get's blocked in a dragnet because you've a noisy neighbour. But like others have stated, move neighbourhoods.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

[1] https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/

nsajko• 4 years ago

The sad thing is that a solution for protection against spam has existed for about thirty years, yet it is almost unused. It is based on the same idea that later came to underpin Bitcoin: proof of work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30220979

pl0x• 4 years ago

The adblock lists are out of the control. Adblock Plus and Brave will block put your site on a block list to then sell ads against your site to companies like Verizon and Google.

Brave loves Verizon so much they even listed them as a featured advertiser. https://brave.com/brave-ads/

walrus0110• 4 years ago

note that there is a huge difference between corrupted for profit things like "adblock plus" and the community sourced, not for profit things like ublock origin.

causality0• 4 years ago

I signed up for random stuff quite liberally

Wait, what? That's like off-handedly mentioning you eat a pine cone for breakfast every day and glossing over it like we're not going to wonder if you're crazy.

annoyingnoob• 4 years ago

Blame your ISP, or hosting provider. As an email admin, I deal every-single-day with phishing and malware that comes through email. There is not a single hosting company that does anything more than pass complaints onto the spammer - thus verifying that I'm a good target and causing even more of a problem.

While I do not use any blacklists, I do make my own. I've found that blocking individual IPs is useless, there is always another one. However, if I block the entire IP range I have much more success.

This is your hosting company's fault for allowing spamming and doing nothing about it.

johnklos2• 4 years ago

The author has some oversimplifications which would be worth addressing.

First, there actually does exist a strata of spam which is plainly illegal. All the phishing spam and all the messages that claim to be from networks and/or addresses that they are not, for example, are illegal. The problem is that it's not enforceable.

Second, sending unsolicited messages when you do not have the permission of the sender is unambiguously wrong. Large sources of spam get around this by mixing bad messages in with good ones. This is why we get tons and tons of spam from Gmail, from Outlook.com, from Sendgrid, and so on, even though they really should know better.

The point is that your "bad neighborhood" doesn't just have regular spammers - it's almost certain there are illegal and egregious spammers that your ISP is doing nothing about. How do we know this to be the case? Because many of the blocklists also run honeypot email addresses. If email addresses get harvested and someone sends spam to these addresses, you can be 100% certain that no permission was ever given, so the behavior that leads to this is definitely wrong.

ISPs make too much money to punish anyone but the worst of their clients, and that's definitely a factor that contributes to the affordability of the author's ISP.

However, the author left out one big, simple, obvious option: pay significantly less money than the cost of the blocklist extortion to smarthost through an ISP that has good email reputation. You get what you pay for, so when you save on your ISP, don't be surprised if you have to pay a little more to make up for their shortcomings.

adrium2• 4 years ago

I have been running my own mail server for two years on my private ISP and have less problems than expected - even with the dynamic IP address (in practice, it changes once in 6-12 months) and no PTR. I also switched the ISP once. I have SPF, DKIM, DMARC.

Edit: The nice thing about running the mail server personally and without a relay (like mailgun) is that mail is to-my-end encrypted. If the other party is running its own mail server, it could even be E2E encrypted. Considering the vast amount of personal information that going through email, this makes me feel good in terms of privacy.

I have never heard of UCEPROTECT and fortunately, I never had to deal with it. The language on the webpage somehow reminds me of Kryptochef...

A small inconvenience is that I had to unblock the IP on Spamhaus PBL every month. By now, it feels as if they know me, because I now only have to do this once if I get a new IP...

Many mail servers are nice and provide the reason for the block even with hints how to unblock it. I successfully unblocked it on Abusix and Microsoft. Never had an issue with Google.

GMX on the other hand will never accept my email because they require a proper PTR record. They are the only company I have come across and I find that scandalous.

phishersfritz2• 4 years ago

Your comment about no issues with no valid PTR surprised me.

Spamhaus PBL is build based on your ISP telling Spamhaus which IPs are dynamic and which IPs should not send email. Your ISPs seemed to be nice enough to allow you delisting from it, which not all ISPs will allow.

Abusix has a similar list, but its completely build based on dynamic looking or no PTRs. You can create an account and delist without any issues.

Never the less there is way more services than GMX that block based on dynamic or no PTR. A lot of smaller solutions have this option checked by default. And it actually has been a best practice for decades to have a proper PTR.

If you can, I'd set one and be done with it.

shirro3• 4 years ago

I like running my own mail server but I don't want to waste time on filtering spam so mismatches with ptr and hostname are an instant rejection from me.

A PTR match is a very strong signal that I am looking at a hosted server or business connection which is configured to send email and not a compromised windows PC on consumer dsl which used to be a huge problem. ISPs supply those dsl ranges to blocklists as well.

When I first started hosting my own mail it was on an old repurposed linux PC on ISDN in the early 2000s and even then my ISP offered configurable PTR records along with static IP in a small business package.

I moved my family email vps to a different region recently and it took me a few seconds to update the ptr records for ipv4 and ipv6. It seems a very low bar for such a strong signal that you are dealing with a mail server and not some random compromised machine.

thayne• 4 years ago

If I were to design a replacement messanging system to replace email, I would design it with deny by default, where messages that aren't signed by someone on your contact list are rejected. Maybe with a system to request that someone add you to their contact list (though with a limit on how much text can be in that request).

Maybe something like that could be done with email, but without a culture around it, figuring out what addresses you need to add to your contact list when you add new services could be a pain.

djakaitis• 4 years ago

So basically how social media platforms handle messaging.

kazinator3• 4 years ago

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.

derekzhouzhen10• 4 years ago

I don't now; but when I did run a medium sized organization, I used a very lenient interpretation of spamhaus together with greylisting, and my users were happy.

lodovic• 4 years ago

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.

51Cards• 4 years ago

We just recently switched from a self hosted email server to one of the services (smtp.com, smtp2go, etc.) We gave up the fight.

amar0c• 4 years ago

No one sane is using UCEPROTECT.. I would not even care. If someone is using them as blacklist(s) they have more problems than my mail not reaching them. Spamhaus/Spamcop/truncate.gbudb.net/Barracuda with some "premiums" like Abusix is all anyone should need

Wronnay• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_blacklists

That blacklist is listed as "Suspect RBL provider". That says enough about it...

CliffStoll2• 4 years ago

From the Wikipedia article: These RBL providers have demonstrated the potential and willingness to adversely affect vast swaths of internet communications for misguided, reckless or likely fraudulent purposes. Using these RBL providers will likely result in clogging up ISP support channels while negatively affecting legitimate business customers.

girvo3• 4 years ago

That UCEPROTECT racket is extortion, frankly. What a mess.

jrnichols• 4 years ago

SORBS got away with it for years and profited nicely in the end.

lytefm4• 4 years ago

On the other hand, if a legitimate email from a future friend or a potential business associate were accidentally blocked, the lost opportunity cost is several magnitudes higher.

To some extent, this also applies to legitimate business mails going to Spam. That was a big reason for me to switch away from Outlook to a provider where I could configure the spam filter to the equivalent of "Viagra scams etc".

NelsonMinar• 4 years ago

SMTP is a failed product.

alar44• 4 years ago

Not so much failed as just outdated. That's like saying NCP is a failed product. It served it purpose for a time and as things changed, it was replaced.

That being said, I don't know how SMTP hasn't been replaced yet. It shouldn't have lived much longer than the early 2000s, in my opinion.

convolvatron2• 4 years ago

its pretty telling the grandparent used the word 'product'. that's why we haven't replaced SMTP, because everyone is off building products. and they all want to own the whole world. SMTP isn't a product. its an open protocol standard.

(I certainly agree that we should have a new one, I just can't see how that would happen)

sam_goody• 4 years ago

I agree with your plea, and view the current blacklists as Mafia style "protection" (that also conveniently helps the big players maintain their monopoly).

Practically though, if you want to get your mail delivered, you should use Amazon SES or the like to send it - setup is really simple, and they have the clout to not be blacklisted EVEN THOUGH they are definitely being used to send spam. At $1 per 1,000 mails, it is unlikely you will even feel the cost.

(I commented on this a few weeks ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29713030.)

lucb1e• 4 years ago

What would be nice is if there could be whitelists as well, or a blacklist that additionally keeps count of positive interactions.

I've had an IP for about a decade that never once sent spam, but has ended up on blacklists from time to time (hosting EICAR on a web server apparently gets your mail server banned, 15-year-old me found out). SPF nicely says that this IP is supposed to be sending email for this domain. I don't think I'm on blacklists anymore, but email still ends up in spam folders nine out of ten times. People are giving off signals that my messages aren't spam all the time (it's my personal email server).

Years of non-spam emails count for nothing whereas a single spam mail from an adjacent IP can get you on such a list. Somehow it's a bit imbalanced.

knutix• 4 years ago

You should check dnswl.org That is the biggest whitelist there is.

upofadown• 4 years ago

Blacklists are fine. If someone wants to make a list based on some criteria then OK, there is no real way to prevent them from doing that.

The people doing the actual blocking based on the list have the responsibility for their actions. If, say, one of the largest email providers in the world is found to be giving preferential treatment to the email of other large email providers then they can't use some list as an excuse. Their actions are still anticompetitive and generally harmful.

We shouldn't forget to go after the entity that runs the email server that is blocking email from our servers. You don't have to care that there is a list. Blame the right people and involve governments if required.

jasonhansel• 4 years ago

If my understanding of the law is correct, spamming is legal, albeit immoral.

It's illegal in the US: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

wolverine8762• 4 years ago

In email, we have accepted a status quo of unreliable availability (delivery), a lack of confidentiality, and frequent fraud. The post office is far better, other than the latency of moving paper.

We should wake up and raise the standard. We could even make it a public utility, or a utility that contracts to competing companies, or just develop standards for delivery and user rights - nobody can read my mail, nobody can interfere with it, delivery guaranteed within X time, etc. One challenge is to esure that individuals are still able to run their own servers (e.g., develop standards that the FOSS email software developers can meet). But we could have similar laws to regular mail, protecting delivery, confidentiality, and against fraud.

Why do we endure this awful system? Recently I feel like the IT world has shifted from an innovative, creative, we-will-solve-any-problem, build-it-in-our-garage community, to one that is defeatist (nothing we can do), status quo, depends on mega-corps (or VCs) for everything, and which prizes a how-much-can-I-take narcissistic business mentality rather than a creative, change-the-world engineering one.

hiptobecubic• 4 years ago

I think the stakes have become too high to treat IT like the wild west. There are too many stakeholders and too much money behind it. Haskell adopted the motto "avoid success at all costs" to prevent falling into the same pattern.

jesprenj• 4 years ago

F*k UCEPROTECT!

I got listed as well (layer 3 only), because there were more than 32 cases of spam in an ISP that maintains more than 4 /16 networks across the whole country. With the whole AS blocklisted, I fail to see the point of UCEPROTECT and agree with the OP that they are mere thieves.

On topic of protecting people, they have a trivial XSS right on the input field where one checks if their IP address is listed - yes, a GET variable is printed directly to HTML.

</rant>

saul_goodman• 4 years ago

The UCEPROTECTL blacklists self-clear after a while and it's not nearly as bad other "real" blacklists. Considering all the other hassles one must engage in for self-hosted mail, this one is not high on my list of worries. My host occasionally pops up on these for a few days and usually clears without incident. But yes it's frustrating that my mailhost can be guilty by association despite being in good standing otherwise.

And of course the side-benefit for Gmail to enforce more anti-spam provisions is that it increases the reliability of the data they can mine from your mail, and my mail too since so many people still use Gmail.

paulnpace• 4 years ago

For the past five years or so at least 80% of spam that reaches my inbox is from Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft.

I've been running my own mail server for 9 years now and I don't use any blacklists.

Blacklists are the red line districts of the web. They are just a large blunt tool used in a very inappropriate way. The system of IP address space ownership assignment where the vast majority of the IP address users will never own an IP address. It's like renting a business suite in a large office building and being accountable for some unscrupulous neighbor.

zepearl2• 4 years ago

Is anybody using "fail2ban" connected to "badIP"?

(as described e.g. here https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/protect-your-server-comp... )

(in both modes, download & upload)

My root server hosts as separate VMs at least a website and an email server => both are magnets for all kinds of scans and intrusion attempts => I've got logscans + honeypots etc... set up (fail2ban then closes the source IP's connection for a while) which seem to be working.

I wonder if things could improve (e.g. preemptive FW-drop) by making fail2ban use "badIPs", and to make fail2ban feed back to badIPs the "bad IPs that I identify"? Any personal experience in this area here? How dynamic/reliable are "badIPs" lists?

dqv3• 4 years ago

I tried to use F2B and https://voipbl.org on a small 1 core + 1 GB RAM vm and it did not work out very well. I'm pretty sure iptables was crashing because there were so many IPS to block. Your mileage may vary. Probably needs something a little more powerful than what I had.

zepearl2• 4 years ago

Thanks - yeah, I did think that that list might be quite long... .

_dain_• 4 years ago

Makes you wonder if email will someday become so unusable we'll go back to using the post.

chaircher• 4 years ago

Anecdotal but I've just had a company write to me by post because they didn't recieve my last email I definitely sent them, and I'm going to have to write back to them by post.

vidanay• 4 years ago

I used to have a credit card company that would send me a letter by post every month stating "You have signed up for paperless billing. Please check your account online for your statement."

airocker• 4 years ago

We have the same problem, even our verification email during registration goes to spam sometimes. Should there be a law that a legitimate company register their domain in a registry that spam filters have to ignore? Otherwise, companies controlling spam filters can choke other companies.

shirro3• 4 years ago

My main issue is one big US company which has history of engaging in monopolistic practces. They blocked a huge range of Linode IP space in December/January including one of my servers which has a totally clean record, supports every industry standard and is only used by my immediate family. It is guilt by association but blocking email because someone lives in the wrong neighborhood isn't a civil rights violation unfortunately.

When a very big company blocks nearly all email from another company that they compete with in hosting services I think it should be investigated as a possible abuse of market power by the EU and DOJ. I think there are important questions to be asked about the damage this does to competition and consumer choice.

I wouldn't worry about UCEPROTECT listing. They have an option to pay to remove IPs which to me looks like a protection racket. If anyone blocks solely on the basis of those lists instead of taking signals from more respectable block lists they are only hurting their own customers by blocking legitimate email.

I have multiple servers at multiple providers for various things so it is relatively trivial for me to add a rule to a transport map and have my server securely login into another machine to relay the email to a misbehaving receiver. But that requires slightly more than minimal knowledge and many people are pushed towards a small number of gatekeepers who will ultimately be purchased by a cartel of mega companies and nobody will know how to run a mail server anymore. Which is a shame because it really isn't very hard or very technical. What makes it tedious is the behaviour of some companies. The technical workaround to a block is as easy as routing email via another IP and takes a few minutes.

But then there is the process of getting the original IP unblocked, sometimes via multiple processes in businesses with a single owner, seemingly none of them knowing what the others or even their own tech people are doing. And/or swapping out the IP for one in a clean block.

ILMostro73• 4 years ago

Blacklisting an ISP's ASN or entire network range because the blacklist creator set an arbitrary threshold of acceptable number of spam activity from 1 or more IPs. I'm really not sure about the legal aspects here, but there are so many practices that blatantly approach extortion. And it's skillfully done in the name of "online etiquette" or a "safe internet".

Obviously, legitimate use-cases exist for such services, provided that they are operated faithfully by people/entities with some level of credibility.

Whether or not Spam is legal, many (or most) service providers list it as prohibited in their SLA (Service-Level Agreement). Depending on the type of setup they run--the clientele; company focus/prioritization of ROI--they forward complaints to the account owners, with the understanding that the activity must be stopped. Again, this depends on the service provider, especially as you start thinking on a more granular level. E.g. they can have automated systems handling much of this, or they may have employees handle the communications and provide help to their clients in thwarting such activity. Generally, though, the account owners need to balance the security with compatibility--or the uptime and short-term performance of their services.

Ultimately, however, some of these spam block-lists--UCEPROTECTL3 in particular--are blatantly using a sledge-hammer approach for little benefit to any of their users, in the hopes of spurring controversy; or fear that leads to customers; or outrage from customers toward the service providers. In the end, the intention is purely to get paid, either by clients who sign up for their service or by the internet service providers that can't wait multiple days or weeks until their network gets de-listed. Their accusatory and aggressive language conveys to people that they must be associated with either some amateur company or one that uses, and knowingly profits from, nefarious practices and shady characters if they somehow ended up on their list.

Depending on where you stand, it can be seen as deplorable or underhanded behavior maybe even rising to the level extortion, or it can be considered a shrewd business tactic.

snowwrestler2• 4 years ago

If my understanding of the law is correct, spamming is legal, albeit immoral. If I were the hosting company, and I had a paying customer that is conducting legal business on my network, on what grounds can I evict them?

Hosting companies can kick customers off for basically any reason they want to. High-end hosting companies will absolutely kick a customer off if the customer’s activities result in spam blacklisting.

When I first signed with Rackspace, it took almost a week to negotiate their AUP (acceptable use policy). They were basically unwilling to give us any solid assurances about account suspension. They gave themselves enormous room to determine what was acceptable behavior on our part.

If you haven’t carefully read your host’s AUP, it might be enlightening. If your host doesn’t have an AUP, or doesn’t enforce it, then yeah maybe that is not the best neighborhood.

parkingrift• 4 years ago

The entire email, message, and phone model is upside down for me.

Rather than defaulting to allow-all, it should default to deny-all. Content is let in on a case by case basis.

I found an email service the operates this way, Hey.com. Unfortunately, it’s pretty sparse in mostly every way but this. However, it’s practically impossible for me to receive spam. You can’t get into my inbox unless I’ve approved you.

It doesn’t make any sense (to me) to maintain these hilariously complex deny lists that results in infinite cat and mouse. Just deny everything and only allow in known good actors. Voila.

martinald• 4 years ago

This is actually a really big and growing problem IMO.

I gave up trying to run SMTP ourselves years (decades?) ago. Services like Sendgrid et al all made it very easy.

However, in the last couple of years I've noticed even the basic paid plan on Sendgrid, Sparkpost, Mailgun (I've tried them all now I think?) still gets constantly blacklisted. Going to support gives you one answer: upgrade to a dedicated IP, which is close to $100/month, and really quite wasteful on the IPv4 space (if anyone knows a cheaper/better alternative, please let me know!).

The problem is I am often building systems which require very little (but really important) email - the odd password reset request perhaps.

For small webapps you're going to be spending probably more for this dedicated email IP than the rest of your infra combined.

qwerty456127• 4 years ago

This is blatant racketeering - they create a problem for you and demand you pay them for protection.

pabs3• 4 years ago

Last time I was an admin of a server that got onto SMTP IP blocklists, it was because some spammer had brute-forced the SMTP password of one of our users and was sending out spam through that account. Passwords are terrible, switch to using certs/keys instead of passwords if you can.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

It's not a new thing. I was a sysadmin for a small ISP back in the early 2000s and we had a hate relationship with Spamhaus. They were militant, trigger happy, and very difficult to work with. It was an ongoing headache.

I figure that places like spamhaus are a good part of why gmail took over.

assaflavie• 4 years ago

SMTP is just a bad protocol and it needs to go away. Unworkable.

Terry_Roll• 4 years ago

I think this blog should be retitled to some big US tech firms are out of control.

The US firm providing anti virus/antispam to UK politicians wont even confirm if they have blocked email sent from constituents to UK politicians.

Some websites also block emails from some European email providers, but it always traces back to US tech firms.

chriscjcj• 4 years ago

I commented recently on this very topic and gave an account as to why the company I worked for got out of email hosting years ago. It was blockhole lists.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29675365

cute_boi• 4 years ago

I have never spammed in my entire life. But it seems I am also blacklisted. Pikachu :)

"Sorry, Your IP is listed in some other Realtime IP Blacklist."

denton-scratch12• 4 years ago

Hormel Foods have graciously indicated that they don't mind the use of the term "spam" to refer to UBE/UCE, but have requested that the capitalized version "SPAM" be respected as their trademark.

denton-scratch12• 4 years ago

Level 2 and Level 3 are not blocklists that are suitable for blocking on their own. They are punitive blocklists. They should only be used as part of a scoring system, such as SpamAssassin.

If your outbound mail is being blocked by some server just because your MTA is in one of those lists, it might be worth contacting the postmaster at the other end, and asking them either to drop those two lists, to use them only for spam-scoring, or to whitelist your MTA.

cx42net• 4 years ago

Managing mail servers is nowadays only possible for million dollars backed companies. It's clearly something we discovered while running Improvmx.com.

Of course it's possible (and quite easy) to set up your own mail server, there are tons of guides out there for that, but this is just the tip of the iceberg! Once you have it up and running, you'll find yourself in a constant battle between those who spam you, and those who consider you spammer, real or not.

Using blacklists to filter out the bad incoming email is one efficient tool, but you need to rely on good, reliable and *honest* blacklist systems. Sorbs and Spamhaus comes to mind, compared to uceprotect and backscaterer. The last two asks you money to delist you regardless of what you did, and this is typically bad player playing on top of bad players. They do a race to the bottom by offering a racketing service.

But the worst is still that popular mail server uses these! Microsoft uses UCEProtect to filter email! So, as a mail provider like OP's, you find yourself in a pickle where you need to decide if you want your email to be delivered to Microsoft's users - that means paying, or not.

That is why managing emails has become a million dollars necessity if you want them to be up and running properly. You need to be close to the big ones, have a seat at the big tables where the decisions occurs and hopefully have your IPs added to whitelists.

To plug one very useful link in all this, I'd share Hetrix! (https://Hetrixtools.com), they monitor your IPs and notify you when they are listed on almost all the existing blacklists, and automatically delist them whenever possible, or provides you all the info to do to delist them. As a mail provider, this is on of the most useful tool there is.

gazan• 4 years ago

Hello All,

I am looking for somebody that already has a sophisticated mailing operation, and I have the rest. Anybody interested?

codatory• 4 years ago

UCEPROTECT-2 and 3 aren't blocklists, they're reputation lists. Anyone straight blocking off those lists has most likely misconfigured their filtering and should expect to be missing mails.

NOTE: By using Level 2 blocking, be prepared to lose a few mails too. DO NOT BLAME US, YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED! > https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=4

Use of Level 3 for blocking is recommended only if you are a HARDLINER and you want to cause service providers and carriers that have spammer / abusive clients to be quickly and effectively blocked and it does not matter to you if regular email is also occasionally rejected. > https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5

This has been the subject of hot debate on one of the popular mailing list operator's lists, and the providers that find themselves in Level 2/3 reliably are working on strategies to deal with that but it becomes complicated to do anything that affects thousands of customers. You'll find the providers that aren't on these lists are the ones that have an equally strict policy for allowing outbound Port 25 from their customers and a severely punitive abuse desk.

IMO, I run a personal mail server and deliver directly and if my mail is rejected or lost then I use another mechanism to contact that person (usually telephone) and inform them of the failure. I also provide usable feedback to senders for why I may have chosen to reject their message. And when it really matters, I also have a relay I can use for troublesome transports.

reph20972• 4 years ago

Uceprotect is a scam. Ignore it. Using it for inbound email is a misconfiguration.

reph20972• 4 years ago

People on HN seem to be unable to run mail servers. It's not that hard.

Spam blacklisting is out of control

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