[Mailman-Users] Microsoft blocking our Mailman lists

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Mon, 2018-10-08 at 03:57 -0400, Jayson Smith wrote:
> I've learned this lesson the hard way. Back in early 2011 I signed up 
> with a company called Serverpronto where I could get my own dedicated 
> server. Their terms of service were very clear on the fact that they 
> have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to spammers, and all the 
> horrible things they would do to you if you even thought about getting 
> any of their network on any Email blacklists. Well I signed up, moved 
> lists over, and five days later I started getting bounces left and right 
> because my IP was on blacklists. I assume it wasn't my specific IP but 
> an IP range. I contacted support, and they did…absolutely nothing about 
> it! They weren't willing to investigate, they weren't willing to contact 
> the blacklists on my behalf since "they never respond," etc. I ended up 
> leaving them and switching to Linode. They've since merged with another 
> outfit I think, but unless they've straightened their act up big time, I 
> wouldn't recommend them to anyone!

I've generally had good luck with Linode. Their tech folks are real
geniuses and technically their service really rock. Their tech support
staff is very responsive and helpful, well above and beyond what I
might expect. I run my own mail server, know and understand the basics
of email which I learned back in the 90s working for one of Austin's
first ISPs.

One of the things I offer for customers is hands-off customer-
configured redirection of email. If customer John Doe has a domain
mydomain.com he can set up redirection so that email to 
john at mydomain.com redirects to, say, john.doe at gmail.com. This is a
feature of the Courier MTA which is _very_ useful, and is also
leveraged to redirect mail into Mailman mailing lists. Unfortunately,
if john at mydomain.com gets harvested for spamming, then my server is
burdened with filtering out spam to this address, and a certain amount
gets through. I've written many of my own spam filtering routines,
DMARC mitigation, etc. (i.e. courier-to-mailman.py in Mailman's contrib
collection), but some slips through anyway, and it appears to come from
MY server, if one only looks at the topmost Received header. I've had
problems with public RBL blockages from time to time, and with Gmail,
but I try to stay on top of it and get these resolved as they come up.
Microsoft says they've "mitigated" this situation, but it'll take until
tomorrow night before my server may be fully able to send email to
addresses at hotmail.com, msn.com, outlook.com and live.com.

Meanwhile I have customers, including a county political party, for
whom email redirection is an absolutely vital on a daily basis to their
functioning and I'm going to have to tell them to take their business
elsewhere ASAP, and I may have to discontinue redirection as a service
offering. This is going to cost me a lot of good will and income.

> Just goes to show, the terms of service can be all "We hate spammers 
> just as much as you do, and if we find out you're a spammer we'll do 
> unspeakable things," but it might not mean a thing.

Yep. I am amazed that email, as implemented through RFC 822 and other
early protocols, still survives and hasn't gone the way of UseNet News,
UUCP Mail, Gopher and Archie. It's probably the most stressed service
on the Internet what with c.a. 90% of email being UCE, and there are so
many misbegotten attempts out there to deal with the problem in ways
that break email on the Internet, often violation of RFCs. It's a
tribute to the engineering genius of the internet pioneers who
developed the email protocols that it survives at all and hasn't been
replaced entirely with proprietary services such as Facebook Messenger.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "The first casualty when
FMP Computer Services |         war comes is truth."
512-259-1190          |            
http://www.fmp.com    |     -- Hiram W Johnson