Hard Bouncing

NetHosted Customer Joined: 02 Jun 2005 Posts: 35

I'm getting hard bouncing from Yahoo groups, error message: Remote host said: 550 http://www.surbl.org/lists.html.

[BODY]

?

I have spam assassin disabled and definately don't want these emails bouncing as Baseball season is only 2 months away and it's hard work not coming last in Y! fantasy leagues without updates.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Can you give a specific email address that is trying to send to you which is getting bounced? There is no way around these surbl lists, if Yahoo is blacklisted you need to get into contact with them and ask them to remove their IP from the list.

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 02 Jun 2005 Posts: 35

OK, same question asked a different way. Why is someone deciding what emails I can have and which I can't?

If I wanted spam assassin enabled I would enable it, however I don't want to lose 1 email that I want/need for the sake of blocking 1,000 spam emails.

If there is something in place blocking my emails please turn it off.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Gavin,

These emails are blocked because they are know sources of spam. If this is a mistake (very unlikely, why would some one report them as spam?) then it's up to the blocked domain/ip to get themselves removed. Most lists automatically whitelist blocked domains after a few days if no more reports come in. Spam Assassin is allowed to be disabled because it mainly uses heuristics to work out if a message is spam which can lead to false positives. The surbl lists only block messages from known spam sources so the chances of mistakes is tiny.

This is implemented to save users from spam and to save the servers from the excess load that dealing with millions of spam messages causes. If you can tell me what domain/ip your're having problems with I'll look into this specific case.

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 02 Jun 2005 Posts: 35

The problem is not that the email address is listed as spam, the problem is that 1 email contained a spam listed url forcing the hard bounce which goes back to Yahoo, who then stop sending me emails from their lists because the server is bouncing.

Voila, the spammer wins and has successfully stopped me using my email address because a third party, whom I have not employed as a spam filter, dilsikes 1 out of 10s of emails.

If you're going to employ spam filtering make sure this is not doing the spammers work for them, as it has in this case.

The domain is www.gavinturner.me.uk.

Please remove any spam filtering from this domain.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

So this in fact Yahoo's fault? Our server blocked a message you've admitted has spam in it. You need to contact Yahoo to get them to send to your email address again. It's not our fault if their systems respond to bounces in such a strict way. If a spammer sends to any email address of yours that doesn't exist a bounce will be produced, so bounces aren't a rare occurance and certainly shouldn't warrent blocking of the domain. We'd all end up with blocked domains if that was the case. Maybe I've not understood what has happened here?

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 02 Jun 2005 Posts: 35

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

All that is happening, is that we are blocking spam emails. You have confirmed this. Our system therefore is working as expected and preventing spam from clogging up our servers.

The fault lies with Yahoo, who are asking you to reconfirm your account each time this happens. You need to talk to them regarding their lack of respect for the message in the bounce, and their system in general which clearly isn't workable in the real world. Take AOL and Easily, two huge ISPs they also operate spam blacklists. They automatically prevent delivery of mail from known spammers, we're not doing something uncommon here.

You can't forward the phishing emails? Is that because you're not receiving them? The system only works on incoming mail.

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 02 Jun 2005 Posts: 35

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Gavin,

Just to let you know I'm looking into the way this is implemented to see if there is a workaround for your domain.

[edit] I've given it a shot, let me know if you still have problems.

Andrew

Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:26 pm Post subject:

Just a quick note to say I've had exactly the same problem here but with Demon rather than nethosted. One mailing list I belong to sometimes gets spam sent out by it, Demon bounce the email as it contains spam which then gets me knocked off the mailing list for bouncing emails.

I believe it is a common problem and nobody has come up with a good solution. I would also be not too hasty about getting nethosted to switch off their spam filter. I did this with Demon recently and we now get 300 spam a day which we have to deal with locally.

Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 9:04 pm Post subject:

What about if you signup to the newsletter with another account (eg: Gmail), then have that account forward messages to your NetHosted account?

If NH finds spam, it bounces it back to the other account, but (hopefully) that account wont bounce it back to the newsletter, so you stay subscribed.

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