I’ve broken something in our incoming mail servers in the process of implementing DKIM and DMARC.  It is causing mail to be stuck in queue and not delivered to your INBOX.

     I am working on resolving this.  Mail is not being lost it is just stuck in queue and should deliver once I figure out what is wrong.

     This has been corrected and all e-mail that was in queue has been delivered.

     If you get an e-mail with an attachment claiming to be a contract from a company you’ve never heard of, and the attachment is a “.doc” file, don’t open, “2446.doc” is a Word macro Virus.  It won’t hurt Linux because Librewriter is smart enough to recognize it as such but it will break Windows.  Unfortunately clamav does not recognize it yet though I have submitted it to them today.

     I tried to login to Yahoo again and could not so reset my password again.  After doing that mail is now working to/from Yahoo, both directions.

     Cox.net is now the only site I am aware of that is blocking us.

     The domains msn.com, outlook.com, microsoft.com. and other microsoft domains, yahoo.com, and aol.com are now all allowing e-mail from us.

     The only site that I am aware that is still blocking us is cox.net.

     There were some issues with several of the shell servers but all NFS and NIS is now connected properly, all servers are operational now.

     I have completed rebooting everything that needed to be rebooted.

     I am still checking that NFS partitions mounted properly and NIS bound properly, but otherwise everything is good, most services should be functioning, mail and web both already checked, only shell servers left to check.

     I need to reboot some of the servers owing to updates to core libraries and utilities.  Downtime should be limited.

     Outlook (Microshaft) declined to de-list even though the problem was “fixed” the day it occurred.  I guess this is their new way of attacking Linux.

     I already joined JMRP, I tried to join SNDS but they do not send the e-mail they say they will so I can’t complete the sign up process.

Dear Robert Dinse

 

We have completed reviewing the IP(s) you submitted. The following table contains the results of our investigation.

 

Not qualified for mitigation
204.122.16.4; 204.122.16.222
Our investigation has determined that the above IP(s) do not qualify for mitigation.

Please ensure your emails comply with the Outlook.com policies, practices and guidelines found here: http://mail.live.com/mail/policies.aspx.

To have Deliverability Support investigate further, please reply to this email with a detailed description of the problem you are having, including specific error messages, and an agent will contact you.

 

Regardless of the deliverability status, Outlook.com recommends that all senders join two free programs that provide visibility into the Outlook.com traffic on your sending IP(s), the sending IP reputation with Outlook.com and the Outlook.com user complaint rates.

 

Junk Email Reporting program (JMRP) When an Outlook.com user marks an email as “junk”, senders enrolled in this program get a copy of the mail forwarded to the email address of their choice. It allows senders to see which mails are being marked as junk and to identify mail traffic you did not intend to send. To join, please visit http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts.

 

Smart Network Data Services program (SNDS). This program allows you to monitor the ‘health’ and reputation of your registered IPs by providing data about traffic such as mail volume and complaint rates seen originating from your IPs. To register, please visit http://postmaster.live.com/snds/.

 

There is no silver bullet to maintaining or improving good IP reputation, but these programs help you proactively manage your email eco-system to help better ensure deliverability to Outlook.com users.

 

Thank you,

 

Outlook.com Deliverability Support

     Just an update, I have applied for de-listing of our servers IP address with all of these providers.  I have not heard back from any of them yet.

     We had an issue with a customer whose computer was infected with a virus on February 12th.  That was resolved the same day however in that time the virus tried to send itself to honeypot addresses on the SORBS real-time black hole list and so got us on that list.

     I went through the de-listing process four times and was told by their support people, four times, that we had been de-listed but each time I check they still show us via their web lookup however mxtoolbox showed it clean so just to be safe I decided to move the mail server to a new IP address.

     I also found out barracudanetworks firewall was blocking us based upon that SORBS list entry and they did not find it active so agreed to remove the blacklist.

     Still Yahoo.com, Cox.net, MSN.com, and Hotmail.com still are rejecting our mail with a 450 temporary refused error code and a message that says due to spam complaints our mail is being “temporarily deferred”.

     I have installed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on our mail server as well as the clamav anti-virus milter to prevent viruses from propagating themselves. I have tested these using public testing facilities.

     Other than wait for whatever database these companies are using to timeout I don’t know what to do since their support people are basically worthless saying that what their spam filtering is based upon is proprietary.  Yea it obviously works really well.  So that’s what’s going on with those domains.

     If you are a customer of one of these companies, Yahoo, Cox, MSN, or Hotmail, please complain directly to their support group.