Blacklist Status

Bad news: Looks like both our main mail IP and our new-ish IP that we’re using to test blacklist solutions were listed in Spamcop this morning. We’re looking into it!

Good news: The Comcast/GoDaddy blocks, we believe, were due to them simply not liking the hostname of one of our IPs. They would bounce messages back saying either “residential IP” or “dynamic IP”, both of which were clearly false. We had this *same exact* problem with another IP back in February, and simply renaming the IP fixed it with both providers. We did this yesterday and it has definitely propagated today. I don’t see any new Comcast problems in our queue currently. I do see a couple secureserver.net bounces, but they also include a message regarding Spamcop — so there’s the caveat to that.

If you experience new incidences of either Comcast or GoDaddy bouncing mail (and there’s a fair chance of this happening with secureserver.net), please send those to support with the full bounce error and a timestampped header. You only need to do this once!

We are working on permanent resolutions for these blacklisting problems. The best thing you can do to assist us in the meantime is to NOT report spam you receive on external email accounts that your Dreamhost domains forward to. Doing so may potentially ding Dreamhost for the complaint, even if the mail did not originate on our servers. If you’re hosting mail forwards for other people, tell them too! Certain ISPs (such as AOL) scan every hop in the headers when screening mail, and complaints count against every IP before it reaches them.