trouble with hostedemail blacklist [closed]

Question

The mail server I manage is clean according to 92 blacklists checked by MXToolbox.

But ...

host mx.ecentral.com.cust.b.hostedemail.com[64.98.36.4] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [My Server IP] blocked using tms.urbl.hostedemail.com; Your IP has been sending too much spam

How does one get off of this list? What puts one on their list but not on any of the ones with more obvious rules? Is hostedemail.com some kind of rogue provider?

Thanks!

Answer 1

What's crazy about this (to me, anyway) is that both hostedemail.com and urbl.hostedemail.com have no A records and no website, not even a redirect or a single page that would give people the bare minimum information about their blacklist or service. That's not how professionally run blacklists are managed these days.

My users are getting this:

host mx.DOMAIN.org.cust.a.hostedemail.com[216.40.42.4] refused to talk to me: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [1.2.3.4] blocked using urbl.hostedemail.com; Your IP has been manually blacklisted

It's the reference to manual blacklisting that flummoxes me. None of my servers are in any of the blacklists checked by MxToolbox (and like most mail admins, I work hard to keep it that way), so if someone has taken the time to manually add the IP address of one of my servers to the list then this sounds as amateur as my own manual blacklist I use on my servers when I have no patience waiting for a spammer to be shut down or blacklisted. And it has been there for at least a week; I haven't bothered checking last week's logs, as a week is long enough to determine whether or not a server is (still) sending spam.

After some research I found this post:

What does this error mean when emails are bouncing back to sender?

That led me to:

https://fbl.hostedemail.com/

... which is actually a branded CNAME for fbl-opensrs.app.returnpath.net that leads to:

https://fbl.returnpath.net/

So at the end of that long trail I ended up signing up for Return Path's FBL for their short list of 22 ISPs (including, as far as I can tell, a couple of individual companies' email systems). In doing so I have now agreed to them sharing my "Personal Information with business partners or other third party sponsors of sweepstakes, contests and similar promotions from time to time" (seems like a bizarre provision for the terms of service for a B2B company, especially one whose raison d'être is about reducing spam, but what choice do I have?), but I am none the wiser yet on why my one server's IP address has been blacklisted.

However, like @StephenB, I am going to abuse my standing as an OpenSRS reseller (an account I have all but abandoned because of their crappy service) and send their support department an email. I expect I'll get the usual "not my department" reply, as happened sometime last year when someone was registering phishing domains spoofing one of my user's domains. I'll post the results of that in a comment when/if I hear back.

UPDATE: I did email OpenSRS reseller support and (to my surprise) they responded within the hour to (belatedly) inform me of the FBL. Another seven hours later they de-listed my IP and the delayed mails in the queue went through.

I brought up some of my points above and this was their reply:

Thank you so much for your feedback, certainly your concerns are understandable. At OpenSRS/Tucows we're always looking to provide a better service, and definitely we can see your point as far as blacklist/delisting goes, for the time being I believe the reason for this is due to a lack of resources to put something like this together, but certainly I can assure you it is on our radar. I will pass this information along to our managers so that we can ensure your voice is heard.

Platitudes, but nevertheless positive platitudes.

UPDATE 2: Well, the platitudes didn't last long. They blacklisted my IP again, and this time I was just patronised instead:

I am just replying back on the RBL listing you inquired about and I can confirm the IP was once again de-listed but I did get some additional information for you as requested. I needed to do a bit of checking but the IP x.x.x.x is provided by RIPE Network Coordination Centre, the IP assigned to the user by the hosting provider carries the reputation of the rest of the CIDR. The nature of VPS/Shared IPs is to be disposable, and it is not suitable for sustainable mail services. I would suggest that you should be renting a dedicated IP/CIDR directly from ARIN or any other static IP provider to avoid further listings from happening in the future since its [sic] not necessarily your customers being listed but the IP being listed. But of course for the time being we have de-listed the IP but assuming nothing changes its [sic] likely it will be listed again in the future. Let me know if you have any questions from here.

We've been using VPSes for mail since 2008 (after a lot of thought and research), and have never in that time had an issue. I understand the sentiment that VPS IPs have a lower reputation in the minds of sysadmins with long memories, including myself, but in this day and age this is like saying that "I don't like x nationality because of what they did to my great-grandfather during the war." Properly maintained blacklists are supposed to have a memory hours long (in most cases; not all, of course), not generations long, and OpenSRS/Tucows/Hostedemail are blocking data centres worldwide full of legitimate mail servers, that nobody else are blocking. I diplomatically told them they're using thinking that became obsolete around the end of the last century.

I already have one of their customers (that our users were having trouble emailing) talking to us about moving.

Answer 2

If WiTon Nope's answer was correct at one point, it doesn't appear to be accurate anymore. They blacklisted my server as well, for no apparent reason, and it took a week of chasing them to get that resolved - and it appears that the only reason it didn't take longer (or got resolved at all) is because I'm already an OpenSRS reseller for domain registration (I don't use their EMail service, and I certainly won't be after this experience). Even then, I had to resort to calling them, because the attempts I made to contact them via their reseller support EMail & Twitter were all ignored. Oh, and unlike nearly every other RBL I've dealt with, they fail to provide any method for requesting delisting.

Also, the suggestion to check MX Toolbox doesn't seem to be relevant, since they don't actually monitor urbl.hostedemail.com - and same as with Daniel Wilson, my server wasn't on any of the (more than 40) RBLs that MX Toolbox does monitor.

To top it all off, once they finally DID resolve the problem, they refused to provide any useful details, like ANY reason for having listed my server, or even so much as confirming that there WAS a reason in the first place. I try not assume that people are acting in bad-faith, but I can't think of any reason not to provide the justification for the listing - unless they discovered that was no valid reason for blacklisting the server, and are just trying to weasel out of admitting that they screwed up.