I'm on a blocklist! HELP!

Recently, an abuse desk rep asked what to do when customers were complaining about being assigned an IP address located on a blocklist. Because not every blocklist actually affects mail delivery it’s helpful to identify if the listing is causing a problem before diving in and trying to resolve the issue.

  1. Find out whether mail is actually being blocked, or whether the customer just went to one of the jumbo economy blacklist checker sites.
  2. If no mail is being blocked, it’s not an issue.
  3. If mail is being deferred (Yahoo…) it’s not the same issue as being blocked, and likely isn’t worth pursuing.
  4. If mail is being blocked, don’t take the customers word for why. If they got an email rejected by, say, Earthlink for some reason and then went to the blacklist checker and discovered that they’re listed on FIVETEN, they might grab onto that listing like a rabid terrier when it’s really an irrelevant rathole.
  5. Start with the rejection message. If it has a URL in it, that’s all you need to start with.
  6. If not, see if it’s consistent – does test mail get rejected. If not, it’s either a transient issue or it’s a content-based block rather than an IP based block, and hence not your problem.
  7. If there’s no URL in the rejection, contact the entity that blocked the mail, perhaps.
  8. Make a good judgement call about whether it’s worth caring. If it’s just one guy in his Mom’s basement blocking mail then it’s not worth the time or energy to care about the issue.
  9. If this is really business-critical for the customer then they should talk to a decent consultant rather than relying on their abuse desk for assistance.
Tagged Email Addresses
Delivery consulting: it's all about the credibility

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Why do ISPs do that?

One of the most common things I hear is “but why does the ISP do it that way?” The generic answer for that question is: because it works for them and meets their needs. Anyone designing a mail system has to implement some sort of spam filtering and will have to accept the potential for lost mail. Even the those recipients who runs no software filtering may lose mail. Their spamfilter is the delete key and sometimes they’ll delete a real mail.
Every mailserver admin, whether managing a MTA for a corporation, an ISP or themselves inevitably looks at the question of false positives and false negatives. Some are more sensitive to false negatives and would rather block real mail than have to wade through a mailbox full of spam. Others are more sensitive to false positives and would rather deal with unfiltered spam than risk losing mail.
At the ISPs, many of these decisions aren’t made by one person, but the decisions are driven by the business philosophy, requirements and technology. The different consumer ISPs have different philosophies and these show in their spamfiltering.
Gmail, for instance, has a lot of faith in their ability to sort, classify and rank text. This is, after all, what Google does. Therefore, they accept most of the email delivered to Gmail users and then sort after the fact. This fits their technology, their available resources and their business philosophy. They leave as much filtering at the enduser level as they can.
Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to filter mail at the MTA. While their spamfoldering algorithms are good, they don’t want to waste CPU and filtering effort on mail that they think may be spam. So, they choose to block heavily at the edge, going so far as to rate limit senders that they don’t know about the mail. Endusers are protected from malicious mail and senders have the ability to retry mail until it is accepted.
The same types of entries could be written about Hotmail or AOL. They could even be written about the various spam filter vendors and blocklists. Every company has their own way of doing things and their way reflects their underlying business philosophy.

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Last week Jon left a comment on my post Following the Script. He gives a familiar story about how he’s having problems contacting Yahoo.

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They’re not blocking you because they hate you.

Really. They’re blocking you because you’re doing something that is triggering their blocking mechanisms.
This has happened over and over and over again. Some political or activist website sends out an email that gets blocked by some large ISP and the political site turns it into a giant crisis that means the ISP hates them or is trying to shut them up or is trying to silence their message.
Except that’s not what is going on. The folks at the large ISPs who handle blocking and incoming mail are incredibly smart and conscientious . They take their jobs seriously. They, both personally and corporately, want their customers (the end recipients) to receive the email they want. Additionally, they do not want to deliver mail that the recipients did not ask to receive.
In almost no cases is the block a particular activist site encounters a result of the ISP not liking the content of the email. If an activist site is being blocked it’s due to complaints or reputation or something that ISPs measure and block on. Some person at the ISP didn’t read your email, decide they didn’t like what you had to say and then block that email. That email was blocked because something related to that email triggered the thresholds for blocking.
Of course, as with everything online, there are caveats. In this case it’s that the above statements really only hold true for large ISPs in free countries. There are some countries in the world that do block email based on content, and that is dictated by the government. Likewise, some small ISPs will block based on the guy in charge not liking the email.
Generally, though, if an activist site is being blocked by a large ISP in the US or other free countries it is because their mailings are somehow not complying with that ISPs standards. Instead of starting an email campaign or blog campaign to shame the ISP for suppressing speech, it is much more productive to actually contact the ISP in question and find out what went wrong.

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