As you may or may not know, I run a small hosting company called P2LHosting.com and I recently started leasing a new server for my customers and was assigned an IP that the previous owner had obviously abused, so I inheritied all the blacklists and issues that came along with it. I didn’t know it at the time since I didn’t have anything running on this box initially, but as I moved clients to the server over the next couple of months, the complaints for rejected emails start rolling in, and thus the nightmare began. Granted, I could have called up the DC and had the IP changed (and that’s probably what I SHOULD have done), but you know me… I love a challenge!
Here are some of the rejections notices, you’ll probably recognize some of these:
“host smtp.secureserver.net [216.69.186.201]: 554-m1pismtp01-024.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net
554 Your access to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTA’s poor reputation. If you believe that this failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means.”
“host ecrmdmzmx1.ecrm-online.com [207.54.174.158]:
554 Service unavailable; Client host [darth.pixel2life.com] blocked using Barracuda Reputation;”
“host relay.verizon.net [206.46.232.11]: 571 Email from 67.228.10.58 is currently blocked by Verizon Online’s anti-spam system. The email sender or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block.”
“Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host e.mx.mail.yahoo.com [67.195.168.230]: 421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from 67.228.10.58 temporarily deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html“
Now those are just a few samples, but the one we received the MOST is the “MTA’s poor reputation” version, which is naturally the most difficult to fix. You see, rejection warnings will normally tell you that you are blacklisted from a specific spam filter list. So if we look at the examples above, Barracuda, Verizon and Yahoo all have their own blacklists that you can contact and ask for removal if indeed you are NOT sending spam from your server’s IP any more. So, let’s look at some handy tools you should use to check your IP’s reputation and see if you’re blacklisted anywhere.