Contacting an ISP that doesn't have a postmaster page

How do you contact an ISP about a block that doesn’t have a postmaster page? While there’s no one answer, I do have some suggestions.
Start by contacting the postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses. For smaller ISPs, the same people handling outbound abuse are the people handling inbound filtering.
When you contact them have the following:

  • What IPs you’re sending from.
  • What the rejection message is (or if it’s not a rejection message, that the mail is undelivered or going to bulk).
  • The recipient you’re sending to.
  • The type of message.

Keep the message short and sweet. Do not send 5 paragraphs about your business model. I’ve been on the receiving end of the 5 paragraphs of your business model, as have so many of the ISPs that it’s turned into a joke among delivery: “Let me tell you about my business model…” They don’t care, they just want to know what the problem.
The message should have 3 (short!) sections.

  1. State the problem: “Mail I am sending from IP address is consistently going to the bulk folder. These are [sales receipts / tickets / bills / newsletters].”
  2. State what you’ve done to fix it:”We have changed our delivery in X fashion” (limited connections, improved data hygiene, stopped mailing very old addresses, fired the idiot sales guy who decided spamming was a good idea, whatever it is).
  3. Ask for a resolution: We’d like to know what you are seeing from our mail server that’s causing you to think this mail is unwanted by your recipients. I’ve attached a copy of the blocked / bulked message.

You MUST include the sending IP address in all correspondence. I can’t emphasize this enough. Without the IP, no one can help you. Without the IP they may even not bother to answer you. Without the IP the only response you will get it “what’s the IP?”
Also, don’t try and call. I know a lot of people prefer using phone to email, but in this case, use email. Calls are mostly useless.
The biggest issue is that getting an IP address over the phone is horrible. But when the IP is in an email, it’s a simple cut and paste into the internal tools. But there are also communication and documentation issues. Some ISPs like to have records of discussions about blocking and unblocking. On the communication level, when things are written down then no one is relying on faulty memories or hastily written notes about what needs to happen.
At smaller ISPs or even some small businesses, you can ask your recipients to talk to their support desk or admin.If the ISPs have customers telling them the email is wanted they’re much more likely to make filtering adjustments.

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What is a dot-zero listing?

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Some email blacklists focus solely on allowing their users to block mail from problematic sources. Others aim to reduce the amount of bad mail sent and prefer senders clean up their practices, rather than just blocking them wholesale. The Spamhaus SBL is one of the second type, using listings both to block mail permanently from irredeemable spammers and as short term encouragement for a sender to fix their practices.
All a blacklists infrastructure – and the infrastructure of related companies, such as reputation monitoring services – is based on identifying senders by their IP addresses and recording their misbehaviour as records associated with those IP addresses. For example, one test entry for the SBL is the IP address 192.203.178.107, and the associated record is SBL230. Because of that they tend not to have a good way to deal with entities that aren’t associated with an IP address range.
Sometimes a blacklist operator would like put a sender on notice that the mail they’re emitting is a problem, and that they should take steps to fix that, but they don’t want to actually block that senders mail immediately. How to do that, within the constraints of the IP address based blacklist infrastructure?
IP addresses are assigned to users in contiguous blocks and there’s always a few wasted, as you can’t use the first or last addresses in that range (for technical / historical reasons). Our main network consists of 128 IP addresses, 184.105.179.128 to 184.105.179.255, but we can’t put servers on 184.105.179.128 (as it’s our router) or 184.105.179.255 (as it’s the “broadcast address” for our subnet).
So if Spamhaus wanted to warn us that we were in danger of having our mail blocked, they could fire a shot across our bow without risk of blocking any mail right now by listing the first address in our subnet – 184.105.179.128 – knowing that we don’t have a server running on that address.
For any organization with more than 128 IP addresses – which includes pretty much all ISPs and ESPs – IP addresses are assigned such that the first IP address in the range ends in a zero, so that warning listing will be for an address “x.y.z.0” – it’s a dot-zero listing.

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Censoring email

It seems some mail to Apple’s iCloud has been caught in filters. Apparently, a few months ago someone sent a script to a iCloud user that contained the phrase “barely legal teen” and Apple’s filters ate it.
The amount of hysteria that I’ve seen in some places about this, though, seems excessive. One of my favorite quotes was from MacWorld and just tells me that many of the people reporting on filtering have no idea how filters really work.

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Why so many domains

There’s a company that advertises a lot on TV. The ads are well done, they tell a clear story in the 30 seconds. They feature a pretty and happy young woman dancing around. There is a great catchy tune. From all appearances it’s a successful ad campaign.
The point of the ad campaign is to drive traffic to a website where the domain owner can collect a lot of information and sell it on to advertisers. Every month or so, the landing URL changes. In watching this campaign over the last year or two, I’ve seen at least half a dozen different URLs used in the television ads. Now, it’s perfectly possible that this is part of an overall strategy, but I am not sure. The initial website is highlighted so clearly in the catchy tune, I can’t believe it is part of their marketing strategy.
Which leads me to wonder if there is a bigger problem with their advertising. Do they change domains so frequently because they’re seeing domain based blocking?

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