[148073] in North American Network Operators' Group
Hotmail / MSN blacklisting policies.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James Smallacombe)
Sun Jan 1 21:04:57 2012
From: James Smallacombe <up@3.am>
Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2012 21:03:53 -0500
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
The IP address of our mail server was recently blacklisted by =
MSN/Hotmail. When I went through their steps for delisting, it was =
denied based on "reputation". AFAIK, we have not had a spam problem for =
several months. When we did it was due to a few accounts having been =
successfully phished. Since then our customers have been far more savvy =
and I have not seen the problem. I manually delisted us from all the =
known BLs back then and all has been ok.
A current multi DNSBL lookup only shows 3 out of a couple hundred BLs =
listing us. You may be familiar with the ones that did =
(blackholes.five-ten-sg.com for example). No major, reputable, widely =
used DNSBL lists the IP.
I have been doing this for 16 years. It has always been SOP to provide =
an offending email, with full headers to the complaint recipient, if not =
in advance of such blacklisting, then at least upon request. They sure =
require it of me when I report abuse of their servers. They flat out =
refuse to do this, claiming they have no access to this. I had this =
same issue with Cloudmark's BL a couple of months ago (which Comcast and =
other major providers use), so I suspect this is some kind of outsourced =
blacklist that does a poor job of updating their listings or one of my =
regular customers is sending out emails that are being incorrectly =
reported as spam. I have seen the latter happen several times with =
other servers I've worked with that auto generate legitimate emails of =
reports that customers pay for, but aggressive filters such as AOL's =
auto-report as spam (to be fair, AOL is excellent at resolving these).
We do have SPF records for our main domains, but no DKIM or other =
whitelisting/authentication mechanisms. Is this sort of thing going to =
be widely required?=
