4 ms·

My personal VM has just been placed in some RBL because the entire /24 address space was blacklisted. Someone (allegedly) sent SPAM and now my machine that sen

• xoneill 3y ago
  That sucks! And fixing reputation is at best a nightmare. I've seen suggestions about purchasing / sending email from other domains - to protect your primary domain. Not something I really care to do.
  • nickburns 3y ago
    i've personally observed an increase in this tactic from both reputable companies' blast communications and marketeers alike.
  • cj 3y ago
    Google themselves recommends sending different types of emails from different subdomains of the primary domain to help Google differentiate between transactional, marketing, newsletters, outbound, etc Any half decent marketer will 100% use a different domain for outbound sales (or any use case where spam rate might be abnormally high).
    • xoneill 3y ago
      Thank! Will look into this and reconsider.
    • xarope 3y ago
      absolutely. You should/must separate transactional emails (account creations, password resets etc) from EDM (marketing emails).
  • 77pt77 3y ago
    The "de facto" solution is to outsource that to Google. Email on a personal machine and domain has been dead for over 10 years. You just can't own your data. You can receive it, no problem. But you can't send it.
    • akira2501 3y ago
      > The "de facto" solution is o outsource that to google. So, they have a "de facto" monopoly, or at best, are working with other providers to create a cartel. > Email on a personal machine and domain has been dead for over 10 years. Due to the actions of? > You can receive it, no problem. But you can't send it. You can send it. They're actively deciding to just block you. Then provide you no recourse.
      • 77pt77 3y ago
        The monopoly came about "organically". It's not like there was a conspiracy. > You can send it Not even that. Nowadays it's not uncommon for some servers to even refuse the connection. Mind you, I'm not talking about aggressive spammers. And yes, there's pretty much no recourse.
        • akira2501 3y ago
          > It's not like there was a conspiracy. I'm not nearly as sure. The mechanics of one aren't that hard to imagine. Encourage spammers and make it cheap. Don't ever fight them at their source. Invoke mechanisms that intentionally destroy public utility in public protocols. Force everyone to rely on a small handful of "reputable" senders. Working backwards from "who decides reputation anyways?" might make it easier to see.
    • dugite-code 3y ago
      Sending requires quite a large volume for the big players to allow you to play. The only viable option for small servers is to use a SMTP relay service. Amazon's was a pain to get out of the sandbox mode but has been reliable and most importantly free. As I care more about the recieving side than sending emails this works well enough for me.
• mjl- 3y ago
  yes, this is a pain. the blocklist operators either seem to be not so good at vetting abuse reports, or cause collateral damage to get network operators to take action (while i don't like getting on a blocklist, perhaps it is having a net positive effect for the wider internet?). i do think mail servers/services are using ip-based blocklists wrong. yes, you can use it as one of many signals. give it some more weight for first-time senders. but if you've been mailing (with spf/dkim/dmarc-authenticated messages/transactions), from an ip that suddenly gets on a blocklist, the previous positive reputation should be stronger than that blocklisting, and you should be able to keep communicating with your known correspondents (until they mark your message as spam after which future deliveries can be rejected/junked). it seems those mail servers/services cheap out and apply ip blocklists early in the smtp process. good for their system load, bad for their analysis performance. in general, it seems even bigfreemail services are bad at using existing reputation in their ham/spam decisions. i recently switched an online webservice i made (that is about sending certain notification by email) to signups via email (like how you can signup to mailing lists: by sending an email to an address). the idea: if you send my service an email, i'm in your list of known correspondents. so the confirmation reply from my mail server (spf/dkim/dmarc-aligned) should certainly be accepted by yours (you much more opt-in do you want?). i tested with some bigfreemails, and yahoo put my reply with confirmation (that even references the original message) in the junk folder. to people who think you can't compete with bigmail: the bar isn't as high as you may think.
• yobbo 3y ago
  The problem is that your VM provider is (unwittingly) offering the same address space to spammers. Maybe the spammer was using random addresses in the range? Or someone was starting up misconfigured smtp servers permitting relaying. Running an outbound smtp server on a customer ip-range is going to be problematic anyway. All such ranges can be considered suspicious since the spammers who use them don't care about their standing.
  • 77pt77 3y ago
    True. But I've had my IP for years and it was originally clean as well.