Re:Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choic...
by ananonymoususer on Friday December 24, 2021 @02:11PM
(#29676736)
It's better now, but in the early days of organized blacklists (more than 20 years ago) it was somewhat chaotic. Many large ISPs ran their own blacklists and some were poorly managed. AOL was the worst of them all. Their admin staff was unprofessional and unresponsive when I provided a PoC for their defective spam control system.
There are a few sites where you can plug in an IP address to see if it's on any blacklists. A handy thing to do before setting up a new server is to work with your provider to find a clean IP address beforehand. Here's one that I have used: https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
Re:Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choic...
by NetOpWibby on Saturday December 25, 2021 @03:55AM
(#29681620)
Thanks for the link, I see my email server is on a few lists. I’ve heard that DigitalOcean isn’t good for email servers but I’ve been lax on investigating.
Now I have incentive, this is annoying. Maybe I need a static IP as well.
> If so, were you able to successfully communicate with and/or reasonably work through whatever issue got you black-holed?
Yes. Practically all black-lists have a de-list form that one can use, and most seem to auto-delist fairly fast as soon they don't get any more reports from honey-trap and other sources.
We do have a few custom written ways to detect hacked accounts, and we don't allow users to set their own passwords. We also tend to discourage/deny users who do newsletters and other "higher risk" form of email. All emails sent by websites is sent through different servers, which also mean that a hacked website does not impact the reputation of the email servers.
Events with black lists maybe occur once a year and as I mentioned above, fixed fairly fast. One good tip is to keep an automated eye on the mail queue and react quickly when things start to look wrong.