CBL/XBL Blacklist Issues / Bouncing Mail
We have been having issues for the past few days with mail being rejected due to several of our main IPs being listed, de-listed, and re-listed within a matter of hours in the CBL blacklist. Earthlink among many other providers use this blacklist to reject mail. The XBL blacklist also incorporates CBL into their listings.
If you have had mail rejected on an IP in the range of 208.97.132.X with a link to cbl.abuseat.org or spamhaus.org/xbl, this is the cause, and it is something that we are currently corresponding with the maintainers of the CBL to remedy as soon as possible.
From their early indications this does not appear to be due to spam complaints, but rather some misunderstandings in how our DNS and mail load-balancing works. We are hoping that we can clarify the issue and/or resolve any problems within the next couple days (if not hours). Currently we are just waiting to hear back from the CBL team again to clarify precisely what in our DNS is causing them to list us. Our overall mail DNS system has not changed since February 2006, short of the addition of new servers behind our load-balancer that all use the same pool of public IPs.
DreamHost remains committed to combatting spam, per our stringent anti-spam policy:
http://www.dreamhost.com/spam.html
You do not need to write support about this issue (or the related issue of Earthlink blocking our mail), as we are actively monitoring the latest outgoing mail logs to keep up-to-date on the situation. For original mail you are sending, you can send via Webmail (at http://webmail.yourdomain.com ) and this will go out on different IPs that should not be blocked. If you utilize email forwarding to an address that is protected by these blacklists, it is strongly suggested that (if you don’t already) you set up a mail user on our servers to also receive copies of email for your address.
I apologize for any difficulty that these blocks are causing, and appreciate everyone’s continued patience in the meantime.
.
January 3rd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
well im glad dreamhost is staying on top of this, but I havent had any problems with getting my mail at my gmail account, and even if it wasnt it doesnt matter that much to me.
Thanks Dreamhost!
January 3rd, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I can’t send anything from Webmail, let along access it. I get this message:
Error connecting to IMAP server: mail.mydomain.com.
2 : No such file or directory
Anyone else getting this?
January 3rd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Thanks Dreamhost for the update. Looking forward to having it all resolved!
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Wow, I just noticed that my university was blocking my mail as of moments ago, sent them a support request and within seconds of that I see this post. Thanks for working on it guys, I’m glad that you keep us all apprised of what’s going on
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Also note this is blocking incoming mail too.
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Not enough - I’m still getting spam. (grin) This surely is a headache for all involved.
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:34 pm
@Alicia–
Try ( is your incoming mail server, not where you check your e-mail from a browser).
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Argh!
My message should read:
Try <webmail.mydomain.com>. <mail.mydomain.com> is a mail server.
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:36 pm
What about incoming mail being bounced? Is this affecting incoming and outgoing mail? We have mail bouncing all over the place, and it is a huge problem. If this is not resolved ASAP, I will have no choice but to move to a different provider. I’ve been patient over the months of trouble earlier this year after the power meltdown, but not being able to receive email will force me to change providers.
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:09 pm
“We are hoping that we can clarify the issue and/or resolve any problems within the next couple days (if not hours).”
DAYS??? My e-mail is down now, I submitted a support case 10 hours ago, and NO response… I do realize that it could be do to the case falling into this category, but DH really needs to hire more support people or stop taking NEW customers until they can help the ones that they currently have?
January 4th, 2007 at 12:57 am
I’m just… dumbfounded. Yes, the “full disclosure” is nice and all, but the amount of unexpected issues you struggle with on a daily basis is astounding. My site is slow as molasses (inaccessible at the moment,) and despite filing reports about it 4-5 times a week, it never gets fixed. How exactly do you stay in business? Enough with the cutesy newsletters and awkward staff photos on your web page. Get rid of the referral program, and use that money to improve your infrastructure. Hire many more competent techs, upgrade your equipment, and offer reliable, consistent webhosting. That’s not too much to ask from a webhoster, is it?
If this act doesn’t clean up by next week, I’m taking all of my business elsewhere. In all my years, with plenty of other webhosters and hundreds of sites, I’ve never been with a webhost with so many frickin’ ISSUES.
January 4th, 2007 at 3:54 am
All the dirty laundy is out. I am new to dream host, coming from godaddy headache. Thought people here had no problems. tsk tsk tsk
January 4th, 2007 at 4:31 am
All,
I do know this kind of issue (if it takes days to fix) could really make DH lose a few customers. But to a large extent I do understand that it is beyond their control here if they can’t receive a quick response from the other end. One of my customers has threatened to take his business off to another service provider…but please give me names of a few competitors who will match the “Value-For-Money” features of DH. The number of features that DH provides at that price is truly astounding to say the least. If I were to run a server at home with these features, it would cost me more !
I do have complaints about staff strength, late posting of such downtime notices etc., but all my support requests till date have all been answered within a reasonable amount of time (an avg of about 9 hrs). I certainly feel they need more ppl for tech support with the recent downtimes that they have had, but give these guys time and some encouragement - rather than being super-critical at the moment.
I rest my case…DH rocks…If a customer needs better service, they better pay premium rate charges and move elsewhere. It will hurt me, but I would be happier without an annoying customer who complains too much !
January 4th, 2007 at 5:44 am
I’ll take Dreamhost’s full disclosure over Godaddy anyday.
January 4th, 2007 at 7:54 am
This is stupid…
Since last year:
1. I get tons of spam,
2. I couldn’t set my email accounts for like a month,
3. I couldn’t receive email for some unknown reason,
4. Support’s help is always like “use your isp’s smtp”
5. They answer like 2 or 3 days later by the way,
6. Control panel goes down a lot
7. Can’t send thru webmail, and SquirrelMail is also buggy,
8. Now I can’t send emails to my customers and clients
9. I’ve been blocked from many isp’s
This is been hell since august 2006, and I’m thinking in moving,
I just can’t run my businesses in this place.
January 4th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Could this explain why for the last 6-12 months about once every 90 days I get email that was sent by the server to me roughly 3 months ago?
I’ve tried troubleshooting this with the admins and they aren’t finding any problems.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:25 am
I’m a new customer rather than a long-time fanboy, but I gotta say to the complainers: It’s shared hosting at a rapidly-growing, thin-margin company - you ARE going to have issues like these, and if your solution is to go elsewhere, then try it; I suspect you’ll find that you have different (not more or less, just different) issues with any shared-hosting solution.
If you’re running your business from a shared-hosting account, then you need to consider what problems like this cost. Unless you’re doing a micro-business ($500/mo. on ebay kind of thing), you’ll quickly find that a dedicated server or colo’d solution is probably going to save you more money (in terms of fewer problems eating up your time) than trying to shave a few bucks off of the hosting bill every month.
I’ve run shared-hosting mail, web and DNS services for 10-15 businesses at a time - a tiny, tiny mirror of what Dreamhost has to do every day. And you know what? Stuff happens all the freakin’ time - stuff you should have seen coming, stuff that’s random, you name it. The fact that Dreamhost has problems isn’t exceptional; the fact that they have problems, get ‘em fixed in a (mostly) timely manner and still only charge you less than $20 a month is pretty extraordinary.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Great points Greg B. Thanks.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:14 am
echoing Greg B.’s points as well … but I would like to add: assuming that as stated above, Dreamhost was not added to the blacklist because of a spamming complaint, I would love to see Dreamhost (and other web hosts in a similar size) work together to help hold these blacklisters accountable for the damage they do to unsuspecting and innocent people when they add entire ip ranges to a black list. For example, is there a web hosting industry association that is working on the issue? Are there ‘official’ avenues of communication for ‘reputable’ web hosters to contact the major blacklist organizers to resolve issues, or is it always a scramble whenever something like this happens. Further, IMHO a ‘reputable’ black list organizer should contact the ‘reputable’ web hosting company to resolve the issue before blacklisting them. It should be in everyone’s best interest to work together. Rather, it appears to me that the blacklisting groups like to exercise there self-appointed police powers to ‘regulate’ the internet … they are not the police, they are not the government … they are little more then highed rent-a-cops that filter your mail for you (I wonder if Pinkerton offers such a service in the real world).
Of course - I put ‘reputable’ in quotes above - since the definition of such a word will vary from person to person, and from blacklisting group to group - some groups may consider Dreamhost to be reputable, some may not - the market will decide that in the long run. But in the mean time, if there is not an industry association working on it, I’d love to see Dreamhost take the lead. I’d love to see a few press releases put out … I’m not sure exactly how they could be worded to make the media and general public understand the issue, but I’ll leave that to you experts to figure out …
Further - has any one ever heard of a class action lawsuit by customers against a blacklisting organization for interfering with a contract, or other harm such as loss of business? I would love to hear about steps to hold them accountable …
January 4th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Airwick: Can’t recall the specifics, but there was a recent case in which a judge found one of the major blacklists in contempt of court and, as a result, caused them some degree of pain.
I’m something of a fence-sitter on the issue of the blacklist databases - some are well run and reasonable; others are brittle and fanatical and hard to deal with.
Related to the RBL/spam issue: When I ran my own box, I simply polled users about their need for Asia/Pac-rim mail connectivity; when they said they didn’t need it, I blocked all incoming mail traffic from China, Korea and a couple other countries; spam dropped by two-thirds overnight. **NOT** saying Dreamhost needs to do this, of course - they have to have solutions in place that balance maximized connectivity with anti-spam and security concerns. But the one thing I miss about running my own boxes is the ability to institute very specific stuff like that.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:43 am
We could write online petition against a blacklisting organisations. e.g. http://www.petitionspot.com
January 4th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Would anyone happen to know if gmail uses these blacklists? And if so, does the mail bounce, or do they put it in the user’s spam folder?
January 4th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Blacklisting’s such a thorny issue, but it comes down to the decision of the ISP to use one or not. Someone made a point about letting the market decide.
Earthlink has chosen to use a particular blacklist that currently has DreamHost on it. If enough Earthlink customers scream loud enough, they’d stop using that one. But it’s highly unlikely that there will be enough screaming to make this happen.
With thousands (or millions) of customers, a company is unlikely to reach any type of consensus among customers as to how to block spam. They just have to experiment until they can strike the least offensive balance.
For now, it’s up to DreamHost to keep working with this particular blacklist to remove the IP address(es) in question. I wouldn’t be surprised if the listing was legitimate due to a spam compromise, but hopefully DH will untangle this mess soon.
January 4th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Any updates?
It’s pretty embarassing that all my clients think their e-mails don’t reach me (i forward to my earthlink account).
When will this get fixed?
January 4th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
A friend of mine runs a hosting company. (It’s all Windows based, or I’d be using him for the stuff I have at DH.) He’s whitelisted with every major ISP. That said, one of his customers goofed and sent out a few thousand emails to each customer in their DB. Some of the ISPs blocked him but due to his footwork before the issue, he had direct phone numbers for the right people to talk to to get the block turned off.
He is smaller than DH, so it seems like DH would have more power than he to make the same connections.
January 4th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
This is great…
Since last year:
1. I don’t get tons of spam,
2. I can set my email accounts all the time,
3. I can receive email
4. Support’s help is always like “use your isp’s smtp” and I do.
5. They answer like 2 or 3 hours later by the way,
6. Control panel never goes down
7. Can send thru webmail, and SquirrelMail
8. I can send emails to my customers and clients
9. Never been blocked from many isp’s
This is been great since August 2004, and I’m not thinking in moving,
I can run my businesses in this place.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
All is well. I think.
I noticed during the CBL/XBL listing of Dreamhost that any email sent to addresses at MSN.com appear to have been silently dropped by MSN. No refusal, no bounce. Just the bitbucket.
Thanks, Dreahost, for staying on top of it.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
FYI–incoming emails from hotmail are being bounced on and off.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
It appears that something may be up with Comcast, also. I just today (Thu, 04 Jan 2007 09:23:54 -0800) received unsubscribe notices for what may be all of the comcast.net addresses on one of my mailing lists. I’ve emailed each of those people to confirm, but it seems very suspicious.
It would be particularly nasty if Comcast is sending unsubscribe requests based on a blacklist entry.
January 4th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
I’m actively looking at other hosts, because of this issue. What a shame to lose a customer over this.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I can’t believe a DH Honcho is looking for another ISP… (shakes head)
What is the world coming to?
We’ll miss you Michael.
(For those of you that don’t know, Michael and Dallas are two of the big guys around here. The michael above is not likely to be the same Michael.)
January 4th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
gmail uses their own spam filtering technologies, they do not use these crappy blacklists. I have been getting all my mail at gmail, no problems!
January 4th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
@Brenthegeek: You can still use RBLs but not issue bounces for mail that trigger any spam-hits. SpamAssassin can label email and not bounce them, only alter their header information. This is how I’ve set it up on one of my own servers and it works pretty good!
January 5th, 2007 at 12:17 am
I have about 40 domains in dreamhost, none of my forwarding is working to earthlink. clients cant send to me, and my clients cannot even smtp out thru dreamhost. using the isp for smtp is not an option for traveling laptops. this has got to work. one client already told me to cancel his mail account and i already moved him to swishmail.com, which works much better and faster by the way. the only problem is that they are more expensive, but i guess you get what you pay for.
i’ve been a customer of DH for about a year, and the control panel has been nothing but slow almost everytime i try and use it. i look the other way because its not often i’m in there, but when mail just stops working, some gets thru, some get bounce messages, and others get deleted, its purely random from what i can tell.
this is no way to run a company.
this sucks right now!
Jay
January 5th, 2007 at 6:35 am
No to mention that we have now not had an update in a day and a half.
January 5th, 2007 at 7:53 am
So - if DH was to raise their fees so they could hire more help, how many of you would do that?
January 5th, 2007 at 8:29 am
This is really messing with my store. Members cant get confimation links for boughten items and everything.
January 5th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Any updates?
January 5th, 2007 at 9:20 am
It looked like the issue was fixed, but now I am having problems again. Earthlink is my problem. I’m having both incoming and outgoing problems. Since the problem (blacklist) seems fairly straightforward, I can’t quite understand why there has not been a) and update or b) a fix??
Also, does anyone know how we’d go about retrieving all the emails that did not come through???
e.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I’ve switched over to Google’s mail server through Google Apps for Your Domain (www.google.com/a) and its working like a charm!
January 5th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I wouldn’t consider this fixed at all! Outgoing mail gets a blocked message and I barely have any mail incoming. DH, please give us an updated status message to let us know how repairs are going!!
January 5th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
The blacklist problem is caused by poor staffing at the blacklisting site, not DH staff. Having worked with many vendors and ISPs, the problem is you call, email, snail mail and they do not respond for days. Even legal action does not move these folks. We just have to grin and bear their poor response, not DH when they have identified the problem and made the connections needed to resolve the issue. I appreciate the openness of DH to tell us that the problem exists and they are working on it. Now if you want faster action, DH should put the Blacklisting organization contact information so they get many requests to fix the problem. Sqweeky wheel sometimes gets faster action.
January 5th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Thank you so much for posting this–I actually have my web hosting through a different company and our messages are bouncing too because of blacklisting, but they don’t have ANYTHING at all up right now to warn their customers, and when we file tickets, they aren’t telling us much of anything. It’s good to know it’s not just my host’s company and it’s good to at least hear what’s going on.
Hmmm…I may have to reconsider who I use for hosting when my contract comes up for renewal….;-)
January 5th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
I think I am experiencing related problems: my mailbox appears to be operating just fine. However I recently noticed a LOT of “Return to Sender” messages that appear to be originating from various (random) mail addresses with my domain (i.e. grasdf @ shannonandmike . net). The messages make it look like the original message was sent by someone at my domain.
I know this type of spam exists (where they try to fool you by changing the sender of the message), but could this be related?
Anyway, keep up the good work Dreamhost. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else (because it’s much MUCH worse at the GoDaddy’s of the world).
January 5th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I’m confused. I went to the CBL and Spamhaus websites to look up the IP address I have for the mail server (208.97.132.76) and both sites say that its not on the list - yet, I am getting Relay Access Denied issues when I try to send an email (from another server) to one of the exisiting addresses.
Any thoughts?
January 5th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Clients are unable to send email to @earthlink accounts.. hope this gets resolved soon, DH.
January 5th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
A suggested solution: have an extra service (possibly for-pay) where a different outgoing mailserver is used. This mailserver could only be used after approval.
Effectively this would put those who have really important email on their own smaller “ISP” for outgoing email.
January 5th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
This is STILL an ONGOING issue. I am having critical emails returned from accounts I have corresponded with for over a decade. Time Warner will not accept SMTP for non-TWC emails. You NEED to have THREE people massaging Earthlink 24/7 to correct this situation.
January 5th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
This one’s mind-blowing.
Time to start looking for another host after 8 years with DH. (Hmmm, Earthlink hosting isn’t sounding so bad - bet they don’t have this problem)
January 5th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
still not working. can’t send email to earthlink.
January 5th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
I’m _still_ getting ye ol’ bounce from EL/Mindspring. I appreciate the problem … the CBL people apparently just changed something in their set up that is relisting DH, and probably some others. That’s not our fault, that’s not EL’s fault.
Well … I think it’s time to post for us the contact e-mail for those folks. Obviously your efforts are not making them fix this fast enough. Let us start complaining too. I’ve already told EL what I think of their choice of blacklist provider, let’s start sharing our pain with the source of the problem. >:(
January 6th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Well i moved my stores email to google and everything seems to be working again……
January 6th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Is the earthlink problem solved? when are we going to be able to forward through earthlink? I am using DH webmail currently, but with a LOT of spam. Can you post more updates please?
January 6th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I can’t believe this is still screwed up. Now mail is bouncing email to joimail.com
This is making it very difficult to do business with clients via email. Especially when I’m setting up their brand new web site on DH servers. This sure isn’t looking good in my client’s eyes, that’s for damned sure. Surely it doesn’t take an act of congress to get this resolved.
January 6th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Now we are getting bounced from others, not just Earthlink and it is becoming a problem. We also suspect that other mail is being bounced with no notification to us as we are having issues with our contacts. There appears to be no new news on this matter since it started occurring, at least with us, about a week ago.
Serious problem and we need more regular updates as to progress/lack thereof. Trying to be patient but it’s tough in a vacuum.
The workaround gets to be tedious very quickly and mail does not go out as we would like format wise and we have no interest in investing time in webmail to work with formats and signatures.
Love you guys but gotta admit the negative activities of the last 6 months or so are starting to shake our confidence.
January 6th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I just called Earthlink support and reached a supervisor. He asked me to log in to my ‘blocked’ webmail and send a test message to my earthlink account, which I did. Interestingly, it got through just fine to my earthlink account.
But, like everyone else here, my forwarded messages from three domains on dreamhost are NOT going through.
So - it’s the forwarded messages that are being blocked, not sending from the actual domain.
Dreamhost I hope this helps you sort out the problem, looks like something’s going on with the ‘forwarding’ end of things……
January 7th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Hi,
I manage my primary mail server at my office and backup mail server, that I do use with DH guys. But I noticed that, my that mailbox is always full of SPAMs. i.e. from DH hosting network itself, some spam guys are there who are originators of spams, because according to my DNS, i use DH mail server as my backup server and it should used by other SMTPs only when my main server is down, still I am having spams increasing in DH mailbox. I am still not 100% sure on this statement but DH is having some clients who are doing some spam activities or other guys are there, who are leeching DH domain details and sending SPAMs directly. God knows whats the truth but DH team, please resolve this issue asap.
I am also have many plus points like providing SVN kind of automated services and SHELL access etc., in this cost.
Ashvin
January 8th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Ashvin –
We’d ask you to contact us at abuse (at) dreamhost.com with some of the spams in question, with full headers. We can easily determine whether or not it originated on our network, and take appropriate action if so.
More often than not, though, spam complaints we get are mail that was forwarded through an account that did not have filtering active (an option in the control panel) or mail whose first ‘Received” header was spoofed to include one of our IPs, but did not actually originate on (or potentially even pass through) our system.
January 8th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I still can’t email earthlink…
Is there any news?
This outage seems extreme.
January 8th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Looks like you guys are making progress.
I see only one blacklist left:
http://www.robtex.com/rbls/208.97.132.83.html
January 9th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Well, I really can’t say that I can blame DH at all. I have found DreamHost to be reasonably cooperative at the very least, if not simply outstanding in customer service. I specifically do not run a mail server on site because it would become my full time job to always be tweaking it to work properly. That’s why we hired DH to take care of this headache for us. Good job, guys!! Thanks!
The entire war on spam is crap anyway. As things stand now, we are at the mercy of these self-ordained blacklist agencies. Spam filters change their rules frequently to filter out new spam methods. Spammers adapt. Spam filters get reconfigured again. Everytime you fix your own mail server configuration and think you’ve got it working, the rules change all over again and then suddenly important, valid, expected, business emails are blocked all over again. Businesses are sitting around waiting on information from other businesses that never arrive; people want to talk to people, and those people want to listen, but CAN’T!! The END-USERS are the ones who need a way to take back their spam filtering and control it for themselves, and not be at the mercy of some stupid third party organization standing around not doing anything to help, because their REAL customers are big ISP organizations like Earthlink, etc. Companies like Earthlink (and DH, too, as a matter of fact) subscribe to these stupid black-lists because of all the customer complaints coming from people who are tired of getting more spam everytime they give their email address out indiscriminately to third party websites to do their shopping and what have you. I can’t help but feel that the war on spam has stooped to the “lowest common denominator” here.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Also, I have been finding lots of reports of mass email loss by Earthlink. I don’t think it’s just us.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Remember, if any of you are using DH to send your emails, the reply address should have your actual domain name as part of the return address, plus you should also have SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records set up in the DNS. This will help protect your domain from people spamming while spoofing your domain. Let’s say you owned the site “tomswidgets.com” and I decided to send 10,000 spams from “spammaster@tomswidgets.com” from somebody else’s mailserver. The SPF record would show the IP address authorized to send any email from a user ending with “@tomswidgets.com”. Many mail servers will check the SPF’s and if they don’t see it, they could think that your record is spoofed.
You can check your DNS settings by going to this link:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=tomswidgets.com
Substitute “tomswidgets.com” with your own domain name.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Rob thanks so much for the DNS info and link. It showed I do not have the SPF records and I got a warning on that.
This is way beyond my expertise so dumb question - do we personally have to add the records or does Dreamhost do that if we request it? Thanks in advance for any help on that.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
So is it fixed? I just added a new domain today and was trying my new mail to work with Outlook Express… My email can indeed Send with no problem, but when I replay back [thru another email] the email bounces back and stating the below:
This is the Postfix program at host randymail-a12.dreamhost.com.
I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be
be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The Postfix program
(expanded from
): unknown user: “mxxxxxx”
–
“I x’s the acct number!” So anyway, is this part of the problem? Or is it me? Thanks anyone!
January 10th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
You are getting on RBL’s because you are sending out spam. I have logs that show attempts to send spam to non-existant accounts on my mail server from your 208.97.132 netblock. You really need to fix this problem. Don’t send backscatter email.
I’ve forwarded some relevant entries to abuse@dh.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Pat, was that directed to me?!? I’m not sure. I was using my new mail [robert@allthingsbutnone.com] to my other email address [robert@mrhappysad.com]. Wait, who needs to fix this problem? Me or Dreamhost?!? Now I’m totally lost. feh!
January 11th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
I’m with Barb.
Of the half dozen items in the dnsreport for my domain, the only one I’ve a clue about is making sure there’s an address abuse@mydomain.
At least one, indeed, seems to be related to the DH load balancing: Mail server host name in greeting
On the plus side, it’s been a couple of days since I’ve had a problem getting mail through to earthlink. [Though I did break down and set up a real mailbox on Dreamhost instead of forwarding my own mail through to earhlink.]
January 14th, 2007 at 10:42 am
When I check http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreport.ch for my DH-hosted domain I get these warning and failure messages, including one about SPF!
You have duplicate MX records. This means that mailservers may try delivering mail to the same IP more than once. Although technically valid, this is very confusing, and wastes resources. The duplicate MX records are: fltr-in4.mail.dreamhost.com. and fltr-in3.mail.dreamhost.com. both resolve to 0.0.0.0.
I could not complete a connection to one or more of your mailservers:
fltr-in4.mail.dreamhost.com: Could not connect without glue or A record.
fltr-in3.mail.dreamhost.com: Could not connect without glue or A record.
fltr-in1.mail.dreamhost.com: The mailserver terminated the connection before the transaction was complete (state 1). This is not RFC compliant, and therefore either due to an error, or it may be the result of a non-RFC-compliant mailserver or non-RFC-compliant anti-spam program.
One or more of your mailservers is claiming to be a host other than what it really is (the SMTP greeting should be a 3-digit code, followed by a space or a dash, then the host name). If your mailserver sends out E-mail using this domain in its EHLO or HELO, your E-mail might get blocked by anti-spam software. This is also a technical violation of RFC821 4.3 (and RFC2821 4.3.1). Note that the hostname given in the SMTP greeting should have an A record pointing back to the same server. Note that this one test may use a cached DNS record. fltr-in2.mail.dreamhost.com claims to be host godfather.dreamhost.com [but that host is at 10.3.44.139 (may be cached), not 208.97.132.72].
One or more of your mailservers does not accept mail to abuse@topsailcruises.com. Mailservers are expected by RFC2142 to accept mail to abuse. fltr-in2.mail.dreamhost.com’s abuse response:
>>> RCPT TO:
: Recipient address rejected: User unknown.
Your domain does not have an SPF record. This means that spammers can easily send out E-mail that looks like it came from your domain, which can make your domain look bad (if the recipient thinks you really sent it), and can cost you money (when people complain to you, rather than the spammer). You may want to add an SPF record ASAP, as 01 Oct 2004 was the target date for domains to have SPF records in place (Hotmail, for example, started checking SPF records on 01 Oct 2004).
January 15th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Well this had to happen at some point.
Better now than later eh ?
January 18th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Having this issue on the same IP range with spamhaus today
January 24th, 2007 at 7:02 am
Just hit me today when trying to email an anonymous account at craigslist.org. So it’s definitely not specific to Earthlink.
January 28th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
If you are getting tons of spam, I have compiled a .procmailrc file to place in your root folder which will simply filter all of your junk mail to a “Junk” folder. All is needed is to upload the file to your root directory and rename it to: .procmailrc
Once that is done just login to your webmail or IMAP and create a “Junk” folder which all of the spam will go into. Take in mind, this will need to be created without the quotes and since DH’s Junk Folders are housed somewhere else we have to create one of our own.
Detailed instructions are available here:
http://kevin.hatfieldfamilysite.com/?p=20
For experienced users the .procmailrc is located here:
http://www.projectstuff.org/procmailrc
Since I have added this, I haven’t received a single spam message in my inbox. Good luck — Email me at: khatfield@projectstuff.org if you have feedback or questions.
October 12th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
existant accounts on my mail server from your 208.97.132 netblock. You really need to fix this problem. Don’t send backscatter email.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Thanks you dreamhost for the great work done. Dreamhost Rocks!