Re:The Hostile Email Landscape
by jodyribton on Thursday October 22, 2015 @12:40PM
(#10433196)
I was actually hosting on Linode (UK). My hunch was that they would be one of the more reputable networks; I've run small mail servers on them before (2+ years ago) without any problems.
It's a pity there's no easy way (that I know of) to look up the reputation for an entire network block. I'm glad to hear your experience with Linode matches mine.
People talk about the reputation of their individual IPs, but networks matter a lot too. DigitalOcean for instance is an occasional source of spam; Linode is very rarely; 1and1 is a HUGE headache; and so on.
I have some custom software in place that temporarily drops entire netblocks for abuse, and I did that to keep up with the spam filtering offered by larger services. With so many spammers now switching between cheap VPS hosts, it was getting impossible to do single-IP-only bans.
Ever since the software was put into place the amount of spam actually making it into users mailboxes has fallen off a cliff.
You have to be very very careful about which network you choose to host your mail server from.