Email Address Keeps Getting Blacklisted

[Afasoas]

This is quite annoying.

My business emial address keeps bouncing emails as spam. Last time I found I was black listed, I applied got unlisted pretty quickly. Now I have been blacklisted again, by BackScatterer.org.

The black listing allegedly relates to an event that happened at a certain time. I'm not able to check mail server logs - shared hosting. I didn't send or receive any emails around the time the alleged event happened. I'm not getting any indications of my email address being spoofed. I've recently set-up SPF records.

My suspicion is that this is down to shared hosting and the hosts mail server being used by folk who are spamming?

Anyway, BackScatterer want 86 Euros to unlist the email servers IP address.
Feels a bit scammy to me.

[TimO]

Backscatterer.org (and their parent company, UCEprotect) seem to get quite bad writeups, most of the time, for their policy of demanding payments for removal from their lists, and extending the time you're blacklisted if you complain to them about it!

It looks like it would be a poor admin that used their list to block emails, but people have been complaining about them for many years, and they don't seem to have disappeared, so I guess their apparently somewhat immoral business model seems to be working.

I'd avoid paying them, it smacks too much of Danegeld, but if you're being blocked, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  If it's only a limited set of email addresses which are blocking you, you may be better off trying to get the mail servers involved, to stop using BackScatterer.org's list.

[uphillbothways]

It is impossible to get reliable deliverability with self-hosted mail. You can get close if you're extremely diligent, but it requires an enormous amount of time and effort to get right. SMTP is simply too insecure, there are too many ways for a naive operator to end up blacklisted, often silently.

You have been blacklisted by backscatterer because your mail server is misconfigured and is sending bounce messages that it shouldn't be. The fix is quite straightforward and you will automatically be delisted after four weeks if the backscatter from your server stops, but backscatter is just one of many traps for young players. If you continue to rely on your own mailserver, you'll end up chasing problems like this in future, and it's getting harder and harder to do things right.

I would highly recommend porting your email to a commercial provider offering managed email services - all the big boys have a full-time team of deliverability specialists who work solely to ensure that legitimate mail arrives at its intended destination. This applies doubly so if you ever send automated or bulk mailings of any kind. Google offer an excellent free service, but there are many good options available; Rackspace offer a tremendous service with 100% SLA for peanuts. It simply isn't worth the hassle to run your own mailserver when you can have a professional team do all the hard work for free or for a couple of quid a month.

[Jacomus]

I would second the quality of Rackspace's service, not to mention their 24/7 USA based support team.

Sometimes, it actually feels as if you (the customer) is ripping them (the provider) off!

[Biggsy]

Also consider Fastmail.

[Afasoas]

It is impossible to get reliable deliverability with self-hosted mail. You can get close if you're extremely diligent, but it requires an enormous amount of time and effort to get right. SMTP is simply too insecure, there are too many ways for a naive operator to end up blacklisted, often silently.

You have been blacklisted by backscatterer because your mail server is misconfigured and is sending bounce messages that it shouldn't be. The fix is quite straightforward and you will automatically be delisted after four weeks if the backscatter from your server stops, but backscatter is just one of many traps for young players. If you continue to rely on your own mailserver, you'll end up chasing problems like this in future, and it's getting harder and harder to do things right.

I would highly recommend porting your email to a commercial provider offering managed email services - all the big boys have a full-time team of deliverability specialists who work solely to ensure that legitimate mail arrives at its intended destination. This applies doubly so if you ever send automated or bulk mailings of any kind. Google offer an excellent free service, but there are many good options available; Rackspace offer a tremendous service with 100% SLA for peanuts. It simply isn't worth the hassle to run your own mailserver when you can have a professional team do all the hard work for free or for a couple of quid a month.

Thanks.

This isn't self-hosted email. I'm using Pickaweb's shared hosting, which I have very little control over. I did a little further reading after posting this last night, and there are plenty of folk complaining they get on BackScatterer's list even though they don't think they should be.

As far as I can tell, from reading BackScatterer's badly written advice, they consider anyone using RCPT to verify that an email sender exists when VRFY has been disabled to be abusing a mail server.

I'm figuring my next step is to verify my hosted email is not doing this - which I think I can do using my self-hosted email account, which I only use for personal email on account of the reasons you've already described.

I'm figuring this isn't a result of my email address being spoofed as its around the result of receiving email rather than sending it?

[uphillbothways]

I'm figuring this isn't a result of my email address being spoofed as its around the result of receiving email rather than sending it?

The wikipedia article on backscatter explains the problem. Your mail server is receiving spam and rejecting it for whatever reason, but rather than just dropping it, it is sending a bounce message to indicate to the sender that the message was undeliverable, or an autoresponder is blindly firing back out-of-office messages in response to spam. Because spammers generally spoof legitimate domains and addresses to improve deliverability, your mail server is sending lots of replies to servers that didn't actually send the message in question, which is itself spam. The servers receiving these erroneous messages have reported the IP address of your mailserver to backscatterer.org. As the name suggests, backscatterer.org only blacklist IPs for backscattering and nothing else.

I had assumed that you were hosting your own mailserver, because backscatter is a real novice's error. Bouncing spam has been officially the wrong thing to do since 2008 and there's really no excuse for a supposedly professional outfit making this sort of mistake. I would strongly advise you to migrate all of your services to another provider immediately, because your current hosts simply are not competent to provide business-critical services. I don't use shared hosting myself so I can't give a personal recommendation for that. I have it on good authority that Namecheap are good eggs.

[Afasoas]

To be honest I've dealt with a number of hosts at the cheaper end of the spectrum and I've encountered enough problems to make me considering self-hosting all my email. I'm using my personal self-hosted email increasingly and all the early issues I had with that (using dynamicDNS/Finding an SMTP relay) are nicely resolved.

That said, I won't because I don't yet trust myself and I've other more important projects to complete first.

I think Awfer's is right with the shared hosting.

[Kim]

I'm wary of self-hosting, but I can't deny that my mail system has been at least as reliable as various third-party solutions I've used over the years, and comes with one major advantage that third-party email doesn't (huge IMAP folders at LAN speed).

It does, OTOH, require considerably more effort.  You have to understand things like DNS properly, as well as your mail system of choice, and keep a regular eye on logs to make sure nothing untoward is happening.