Blocked Email Addys

I had a long discussion with Goodtimes about this on the phone last night (or was it the early hours of this morning) and we realised we knew very little about it ....so if anyone can shed some light we'd be grateful.

My own experience... I have two main business emails. One attached to my party site and host server with a company in Peterborough and another attached to my wedding site which is hosted by an American company. At one point , when ever I got an enquiry through to the party site and it was a Hotmail addy, I couldn't reply to it and it would get bounced back to me because my host server had apparently been blocked by Hotmail. I got round it by replying via the wedding site....which was confusing for my client but at least I got through to them. When it happened to Andy with a different email provider he didn't have that luxury. My partner, Paul, has had a similar problem with Blue yonder and Yahoo addys.

This has recently reared its ugly head again because I help run two organisations whereby clients put in enquiries and they go from the client directly to members. Its come to light that some members haven't received the enquiries because at some point their host had automatically blocked mail from a certain provider/host.

Now, if I've got this right (bearing in mind I have no knowledge and most of this is by summising) some one can contact an email provider such as hotmail, tiscali, yahoo or Blue Yonder, say that they have received spam from a particular hosting server, then all mail from that host is blocked. Bearing in mind a host server may have several hundred people signed up?????? If this is right, are these email providers aware of the damage they cause to businesses. A lot of clients use this type of email addy to make enquiries. We could all be missing out on valuable enquiries if this is the case.

Any one in the know and can explain the mechanics of this and whether I've got this right?

I too know little about this except that I was furious to find that when a potential client with a hotmail.com account enquired to me and I replied my reply was blocked, the reason given was something like spam being sent from my server so it was blocked by hotmail.com.

If there are multiple users on one server and one of those sends spam and causes all the other users on that same server to be blocked its outrageous...who the bloody hell do hotmail think they are to block me and maybe cause me to loose income, surely there has to be a law against this sort of practice.

And its worse the other way round. If your enquiries come through to say a hotmail or blue yonder account, you could be blissfully unaware that certain hosts have been blocked and you haven't received enquiries.

This is really a problem with the web host.
If a website contains a vunerability that allows non-authorised users to send email (relay) through it, then the IP address can be black listed.
Most webhosts will assign the same IP address to many accounts - so the ip address of your domain, could be shared with 10 online stores, 20 personal sites, and probably many more.

No internet provide is under any obligation to accept email from any other. You'll be unable to sue/take action against hotmail etc.
There is an agreement between services to accept email, but most servers will run checks on incoming mail to remove spam. Spam is a large problem for internet providers, so the "easy" spam is normally removed before users get to see it. The server will detect spam from header information (faked/invalid) as one means.

As part of a mail servers anti-spam
system, may be a few tools;
-RBL (relay black list/other blacklist)
-Whist lists (a list of domains/addresses that are always accepted)
-Black lists (a list of domains/addresses that are never accepted)
-Spam checking rules (ai based rules checking)

On Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail, they will have some pretty advanced checking to reduce loading on their system.
On our typically "cPanel" based hosting environments, the anti-spam is fairly basic on the mail server, with additional tweaks available from the hosting control panel.

Check your host (domainname) here;
http://www.mob.net/~ted/tools/rbl-frame.html
(ie use google.com NOT www.google.com or http://www.google.com)

This will check for relay blacklist.
In more recent times, there is the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) system is being adopted -I won't explain it here, the following page may help;
http://www.openspf.org/Introduction

Ultimately, if you have email problems, try to get the bounced email and send this to your web host who should be able to find the problem.


From my experience, this is normally due to a problem with the web host. Are you both on the same server?

Sandy - I've checked the IP address of your "christmaspartydisco" site, and the IP address of this server is listed on ONE blacklist;
http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-database-check.php

The IP is 67.220.225.50 hosted by Hostpapa

Its probably best to contact hostpapa to find out why its listed, and get them to remove it.
The problem is explained by the blacklist's website;
http://www.backscatterer.org/

If this is your true problem is hard to say.

Jason

Thanks for that Jason. I won't pretend I understood it all and there was an audible woosh going over my head, but I'm going to follow your links and see if it becomes clearer. I must admit i am a bit concerned about the Christmas site because my main site, the wedding one, is on the same account.

I have had a WDJA enquiry this evening, I am not available to do it but it would be nice to reply to the client and say sorry I can't help and wish them well etc. However, its a hotmail.com so I know its pointless.

I can send to hotmail again now. Incidentally, me and Andy are on different hosts.