9:30pm at night and got an ICQ message from Wilson, asking whether I have noticed that Yahoo is now labeling my server as bulk mail sender. So immediately I tested sending different messasges (all legitimate with non-spammy content), originated from different domains to one of my Yahoo account, and everyone of them landed in the Bulk mail folder! What the?!
Click on “Full Headers” reveals what Yahoo SpamGuard has done:
| X-YahooFilteredBulk: | 220.233.28.239 |
|---|
Sounds like my IP address has just been black listed, and it affects every single email originated from this IP – including personal emails sent by myself! In fact, I don’t recall myself sending any unsolicited commercial email lately, nor have I infected by virus – the mail server is guarded well with firewalls and anti-virii software. Who knows how my IP address ended up over there?! Anyway, if you are using Yahoo, and you are expecting an email from me (or from one of the FOCUS mailing lists), then please check your bulk mail folder. You might find surprises there…
What steps should I take? I might write to Yahoo complaining about the situation. If you have my emails (or other FOCUS related emails) in the bulk folder, please select them and mark them explicitly as “Not Spams” – maybe this can somehow re-train the filter.
Hopefully it is only temporary.
Updated 11 Feb 2005 @ 9:35am: Instead of asking Postfix to send emails directly to the destination, I am having it relaying to Exetel’s SMTP box. It seems to be working now, and all mails appear in Inbox!
i was wondering why the church ad emails i sent out lands itself in the bulk folder … i thought it was some sort of local filtering that it detects because it has these lists as the destination …
I’ve heard of online mail places blocking any IP that isn’t explicitly listed as a static block from an ISP/IP Provider.
For instance, an ISP will mark subnet’s of their IPs as ‘static’ and as such, mail filtering black lists should respect that designation.
However, it quite possible that either your IP isn’t in that list or someone who had your IP before you did something very bad with it.
Either way, contact Yahoo over it and see what they say. As always, being polite about this will get you a long way I suspect.
Al.
I am on static IP (same IP for the last 6 months) so I guess there is no way it was owned by a spammer. However, it is quite possible that Yahoo blocks ADSL/Cable address blocks, but I might need to verify that from someone else on the same ISP…
Meanwhile, I’ll try to change Postfix to relay all outbound emails to ISP’s mail server. I’ll see how that goes.
Hey,
I am using postfix aswell.
And one of my customers was complaining about this.
I seem to have the same issue with my postfix servers.
Weird thing is i tried several postfix servers and some did come through and placed the mail in the Inbox.
The weird thing is that yahoo` header is totaly not clear on why or what caused the other mails to drop in Bulk.
I lookup my ip on olmost all the rbls/spamlists i know off and i couldn`t find myself listed.
So i am wondering did you get any response of yahoo yet?
Else i`ll give them a call this afternoon.
Kind regards
Matthew
I have not got any confirmation yet, as I am currently using my ISP’s mail server as relay, who is not blocked on Yahoo. I would like to avoid using ISP as relay though, as it impose some limitations, and I am running mailing lists for members in the church which can be quite high volume during certain dates…
Might give it a try later to see whether I am still blacklisted.
Did you check your DNS reverse entry. We don’t have that on our development server, but we do on our live server. Email was ending up in junk until we tested it on out live server. Go to this ste to check your server:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
And use the DNS lookup on the top right side of the page.