IP blacklisted

dkrager · 06-26-2004, 02:25 PM

Hi all,

I run a small PHP Nuke site with about 1,000 members. It has to do with classic motorcycles and is pretty much just a spot for riders to keep in contact with each other. Since the site is more of a hobby and does not generate any funds we try to stay as low budget as possible.

Recently I rented a dedicated server from Server Pronto to host the site. I have no complaints about the server itself. It seems to run very well and is perfect for our needs. When I was configuring email I discovered that the IP range where my server lives is blacklisted by most of the spam tracking organizations like Spamhaus. Apparently this is due to problems that have occurred in the past with Infolink.

I have emailed Spamhause a request to be taken off the black list but after reading some of the reports on file about Infolink I suspect they will keep the IP address on the black list.

This brings me to my question. Does anyone know if there are any good companies offering mail relay services? Seems to me that would be the easier way to go in the long run. I am just looking for something simple, inexpensive and reliable. We really only use email for things like the confirmation that goes out when someone joins the site or new PM notifications.

Thanks,

Dave.

**fishfreek** · 06-26-2004, 05:41 PM

Quite frankly a mail relay service would be very high on the watch list of the spammer blacklist orginizations. You would be best served in asking your host to go thru the process of proving the hosts on the specific Ip are not spammers and any listings are old and should be removed.

Ask your host is there is anyway to have your site moved to another IP.

Find out how prevelent the use of the specific blacklists your IP is on is used. For example if your on spews then your really almost screwed because thats a very popular blacklist but if your on some of the less popular blacklists then it might not be that big of a deal.

dkrager · 06-26-2004, 09:02 PM

Ouch! That's not very encouraging news and yes we are also blacklisted in spews. I was afraid that the remailer idea might be flawed. I do have a trouble ticket in with our service provider requesting a clean IP or internal mail relay but to be honest I don't expect them to fall over themselves trying to help us out. Lets face it if you are forced to swim at the bottom of the barrel and rent $69.00 servers you really can't expect too much more than electricity a server and an Ethernet port. You get what you pay for.

I have been talking to some of my site editors and the general consensus seems to be that it would be better just to kill off email altogether on the site. We really have little use for it beyond new account activations and notifications of new PM's

It's unfortunate that spammers have abused the system so badly that honest folks now have to suffer or live in fear of being blacklisted. For us the solution is pretty simple just don't do email. The folks that I feel sorry for are the ones that work hard building an ecommerce business. These sorts of problems have got to be very frustrating because they have no choice but to jump through the hoops.

Thanks for taking the time to respond and letting me know where we stand on this whole mess. I really appreciate it.

Cheers,

Dave

**fishfreek** · 06-27-2004, 07:27 AM

Spews is infamous for blocking entire ranges of IP's because of 1 IP being a spammer. Its quite possible they blocked every IP thats owned by your datacenter.

Thats one of the major issues with discount dedicated hosts. Its real easy for a spammer to pay $69/month and send out a few million spams be fore they get shut down and by that point they have left the server and Spews has done its deed.

TerrelShumway · 07-06-2004, 04:30 AM

Why not just have someone else host your email? Even cheap shared hosts will probably give you more email accounts than you need.

Any host using CPanel should give you complete control over your DNS, but even if not you can always run your own nameservers and set the MX records appropriately.

-- Terrel

p.s. I am not very familiar with PHPNuke, but why can't you run it on a shared host?

dkrager · 07-08-2004, 11:27 AM

Hi Terrel,

Email hosting was never a problem I can do email forwarding through my Zoneedit account. With a PHPnuke site you need to be able to send mail directly from the server for things like account activations, password resets and notifications on forum replies or PM's.

Once things finally ran their course Infolink was able to offer us mail relay services, which effectively resolved the issue. Guess you could say I am a happy camper now.

We were using a shared hosting solution for the last year and it served the purpose well up to a point.

Phpnuke sites can be rather resource intensive and they like as many processor cycles as you can throw at them. They also tend to hammer the database pretty hard with queries. We beat up on the server a little harder than most nuke sites since we run things like Instant messaging, chat rooms, shout boxes and Googletap (mod_rewrite).

Under the shared hosting solution things worked well when the server was not under load but would frequently slow to a crawl causing slow page loads and problems like people getting kicked out of the chat rooms. It was like a rollercoaster ride. We also wanted greater control over the server itself.

A dedicated server solution isn't for everyone especially an unmanaged one. But for us the difference was like night and day. We get consistently fast page loads and all of the weird problems like folks getting tossed from the chat rooms stopped.

Cheers,

Dave

zcoder · 04-11-2005, 12:01 PM

I was in about the same problem, someone else once must have had the IP I got
from my provider, so later on I found out I was on ALL the lists out there.

What I did was went to each list's site , and found a form to have my IP removed and filled it out, then waited for the eamil to confirm it and start the test. they test your mailer
and if you have open relay truned off on your mail server(s) it will pass and you will be
removed. it's a pain in the but but worth it if your provider will not change your IP.

Now I can say that I think these Blacklist do a good job at cutting spam down but they
do it wrong, they need to list only the domain name of the Server found to be an open relay, that way if the open relay mail server was moved with the domain name it would follow the real people that coused the blacklists to ban them and not someone
who may have just got the IP after they was done with it.

You see if they keep just listing the IP then a person hosting a open relay mail server can just change their IP and or host continue to run an open relay, but if you list the domain name, no matter where that Domain name is pointed it can not hide.

this is just my 2 cents.

Zcoder....

LowCostGroup · 01-20-2006, 04:26 PM

That wouldn’t work either I'm afraid zcoder, as a determined spammer would just keep changing their domain name. I don’t think any of these blacklist approaches are effective.
Better is a hotmail approach where users mark mail as junk, and mail with enough votes (and mail very similar to it) is automatically treated as junk.
There is only so much variance that can be added to mail (inserting random letters for instance) before it becomes unintelligible, and the filtering used by professional mail scanning houses is very complex.
If (like a lot of sites and businesses) you already use a filtering company, why use a less reliable method as well?