Igor, I'd say your paranoid, but I had a crazy problem recently with my outgoint email.
This is my $0.02. About middle March emails sent from our domain to craiglist started bouncing back saying that they would not accept email from hosts with the works dyn or static in their RDNS zones. Well, I've been under the impression that static was the way to go for years. So, I called my ISP and forwarded them the email and they said, okay, we'll transfer your IP's to you (we have two 1/2 C's and 1 C'). Well, the 1/2 C's can't be transfered but the full C was. So, like any good administrator, I changed them to be hostxxx.domain.tld. Setup and tested DNS/RDNS and everything was happy go lucky. My clients and I were able to send to ebay and criagslist again without any problem. Well, that was until we were listed as dynamic by spamhaus and sorbs. Apparently after the ARIN transfer, the setting of static through my parent ISP was now lost and we had one very fun time fixing that. Fixing spamhaus seemed trivial, tool a little patient and some tweaking. Problem was SORBS. Apparently SORBS will list you as a dynamic block if your hostnames are incremental and do not contain the word static in the RDNS. So, I tweaked all of the entries again, with the exception of a specific single outgoing relay (which only accepts email from specific internal IP's). I managed to get that one unlisted after almost 30 days of bounces (and finally getting someone at SORBS who in the end was very helpful to guiding me to fixing the problem to suit their rules). Now, with all that being said, my email (from m...@domain.tld to m...@yahoo.com) being sometimes identified as spam since this entire change. Also, the domain in question, which isn't the one I'm sending from, also has an SPF record properly configured, before and after the problem. I think sometimes people make an overly zelous attempt at stopping spam that they cause the type of problems you are seeing. I think that larger companies are even worse at this as they want to satisfy every Tom, Dick, and Mary. Here is an odd, and possible funny reason why we are seeing this problem. I received an email about a year ago from a client saying they were receiving spam from kp.org (not Kaiser, I'm substituting a domain here). For whatever reason, they asked me to block the emails because they were spam and forwarded to me. Indeed it was kp.org, I checked all of the headers, and it stated that they had an update their the lab work for a recent medial visit and that the results were online. I called the client to explain what this email was and they were still confused. Now, what would bigger companies do? Probably after enough attemps, block. This is why we left our hosting company 10+ years ago and started doing email hosting... Many people on this list were doing "effective" spam filtering long before the big players did and they still doing effectively. This big players still, to this date, haven't figured out 10+ year old technology and how to use it properly. Gary ________________________________________ From: Igor Chudov [i...@chudov.com] Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 1:53 PM To: Spamassassin Mailing List Subject: Is email becoming unusable due to spam and antispam? Just today a buyer reported that my reply to him ended up in his spam folder. Concerned by this, I sent an email to my Yahoo! account and that one disappeared somewhere. The one I sent to gmail, however, got there quickly. I may be overreacting and, perhaps, it is a coincidence that Yahoo just happens to be slow at the moment. But I am concerned. I have a general feeling that spammers became so good at making their messages look legitimate, that [poor] spam filters flag even completely innocent stuff as spam. This sending email by regular people who own their mailservers (as opposed to gmail and such) becomes more and more risky and impossible, in other words, email is quickly being undermined by spammers and filters to being unreliable and flaky. That is, now the damage from spam is not only in unwanted messages, but also in email lost due to sloppy filtering. I looked up my PC (75.146.106.188 on static IP from Comcast) and my mailserver (65.182.171.162 hosted in a datacenter) and did not find any RBL records to match. Any thoughts? i
