Could I get a godaddy mail admin to contact me off list? Ive been working with a client who has a hosted website and mail services and lost the ability to communicate with their SMTP server about 6 weeks ago. Been through about 4 hours on the phone with Godaddy Support and Comcast.
Thanks
Blake Pfankuch
Connecting Point of Greeley
Network Engineer
970-356-7224
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Blake Pfankuch wrote:
Could I get a godaddy mail admin to contact me off list? Ive been
working with a client who has a hosted website and mail services and
lost the ability to communicate with their SMTP server about 6 weeks
ago. Been through about 4 hours on the phone with Godaddy Support
and Comcast.
Just out of curiosity--which port is your client using?
This would be when a tcp traceroute would be very helpful in diagnosing the
problem.
Frank
Amazingly its not a route problem. Its actually confirmed an issue with the mail server. Hense me asking for a mail services admin. The issue is confirmed from 3 locations with 3 different ISP's and I do actually know whats going on. I can connect to the server, but it will not allow me to send messages, even when authenticated. Returns a 554. It has been doing this with legitimate mail. They do not have the ability to send outbound as they get a 554 from their home office. The secondary smtp server links me to spamhaus saying that it will not allow relay based on an existing PBL entry. The PBL entry is because it's a residential DHCP connection, and the PBL entry was put in place by the isp. Please see http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL191963 if you have questions.
So. Again. Looking for a GoDaddy Mail services Admin.
Blake:
Sorry -- when you wrote "communicate" it wasn't clear if you had L3
connectivity to that server or not.
All the best!
Frank
Apologies about my response if it sounded a bit terse. I got about 30 private replies of "can you ping it? Can you telnet the smtp port?"
Frank Bulk wrote:
Sorry -- when you wrote "communicate" it wasn't clear if you had L3
connectivity to that server or not.
Kinda sad, really. We used to teach people (even before Intartubes days) that "communication" or "connectivity" came in layers (I'm not sure we used that word, but we used the concept) and you needed to start at the bottom of the stack and figure out what worked so you could eliminate that from the trouble-shooting efforts.
Hi Blake -
With Godaddy The 554 code is a tipoff.
Does the error also contain the text:
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host smtp.where.secureserver.net [xx.xx.xx.xx]:
554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content
GoDaddy has an unusual policy of rejecting any email that
mentions anything that resolves to an IP address on the PBL
list
Note this means any text string with the email body itself,
not the originating IP of the email.
Any text, a URL or a even a dotted quad that resolves to the
PBL list will cause the email to blocked.
By way of example, this policy blocks emails from amazon ec2
merchants even if the email only mentions a web site hosted
at ec2, and the email itself is from a static web server
with proper MX records.
They have been contacted multiple times over the years about
this issue and refuse to change their policy. The PBL list
explicitly describes how to use their list and this way of
using it is incorrect. The PBL list is supposed to be used
to check the IP address of the system actually delivering the
email to your server, not the contents of the email.
Based on their long term refusal to adjust their policy to
conform to PBL intended usage of the list I suspect this
issue cannot be corrected. The only answer I have found is
to inform the affected people they have to move from GoDaddy
to a company that does a better job to correct the problem.
If this is NOT the issue creating your problem, then you may be
able to get GoDaddy to do something to help.
Good luck.
Jeff Kinz.
Why doesn't someone at Spamhaus block godaddy requests for the PBL, until
they get their act together? If they are using the PBL inappropriately,
or outside the terms and conditions set forth by Spamhaus fur use of the
PBL, then Spamhaus has full control here.
I'm sure goDaddy is paying Spamhaus for access to the PBL, so it might be
problematic, but I think Spamhaus should have a policy that if someone is
misusing the PBL, the PBL will be blocked until the PBL is being properly
implemented.
Get it together, Spamhaus, help us out.
Beckman
We encountered some mail systems where they checked each hop in the received list and if each and every one could not be reverse resolved, the mail would bounce. And even if they resolved, they were checked against the PBL. We had to add some internal mail servers to our external dns because of this. I would have preferred just to let the mail bounce, but since they were customers, we had to bend.
Designing a mail system that paranoid is certainly up to individual sites, but they shouldn't be surprised when legitimate mail bounces. Even if you are doing this, it should be to setup a score and mark the header, rather than bouncing.
Peter Beckman wrote:
Thank you all for your help. The issue is now resolved, in an ass backwards sort of way. We purchased a VPS and set up a smtp proxy on an obscure port and mail is now being processed.....
Jeff Kinz wrote:
Based on their long term refusal to adjust their policy to
conform to PBL intended usage of the list I suspect this
issue cannot be corrected. The only answer I have found is
to inform the affected people they have to move from GoDaddy
to a company that does a better job to correct the problem.
GoDaddy is about as worthless of a mail provider and it gets. I can't count the number of times I've had customers get themselves blacklisted by GoDaddy and not be able to get unlisted. Finding a contact number for them used to be damn near impossible. Finding a competent mail admin on the other end actually was impossible. My own company got blacklisted by GoDaddy a little over a year ago. A user with an infected laptop relayed infected email out through the corporate firewall's NAT pool (no longer blindly permitted). GoDaddy's response? The entire /24 used by our corporate firewall was blacklisted intermittently for about 6 months.
Our recommendation to our clients and our SP customers is to not use GoDaddy's mail services. Pick a mail provider that's known for being responsive.
Justin
Yeah they usually simply do /24 blocks. From what I remember in the
blacklist 550 response it says a removal link? Something like
http://unblock.secureserver.net/?ip=x.x.x.x right?
-r
Raymond Corbin wrote:
Yeah they usually simply do /24 blocks. From what I remember in the
blacklist 550 response it says a removal link? Something like
I believe that's correct. It's a shame it doesn't accomplish anything (or it never has for me before). I always had to dig until I found a number for them to call and complain. Even then I only succeeded 1 out of every 10 tries or so.
Justin
GoDaddy never was that large of a problem..maybe things have changed in
the passed few months? Every now and then they would do a /24 listing
but usually removed it fairly easily. Maybe it wasn't noticeable in the
environment that my old company had setup. 2.5million emails sent to a
load balancer which sent to 1 of 8 outbound spam filtering gateways that
rotated through a pool of ips once an hour (5ip's each). So if an IP was
blacklisted usually we would get the complaint, take it out of rotation,
and contact the party to find out why it was listed and take action to
correct it. Or we will see one hour the queue gets huge and take a look
at the emails that are sitting in the queue...if they are mostly
directed at yahoo/Comcast/godaddy then they are likely blocking that IP
address...
Yahoo is tougher to get a hold of that's for sure...they use a different
type of anti-spam system (not that I'm saying its really effective) that
prioritizing / deprioritizing senders emails. At my old company I had
dedicated/colo customer's setup domain keys, spf records, rDNS, and set
their retry times to be short intervals at first then progressively
longer ones so they retry for about two days. I found that over several
days (if you aren't sending spam) the reputation seemed to start getting
better and your emails were being delivered without 'depriortization'
(which is those annoying 451 Message temporarily deferred notices).
Now if you have a system where 360,000 pop3 users send mail through your
network, generating about 2-2.5million emails a day, then a lot of those
are likely towards Yahoo!. Make sure to separate forwarded mail (into
your users inbox and then auto forwarded to user@freemail.com) from your
customers manually sent emails. In some servers it is not really
possible, so run some reports through the logs to find out who the top
10 recipients at yahoo is for a few days. Those are likely the ones
receiving the spam and causing your system to have problems. Grep
through your logs and find out who those emails were originally sent to
and then forwarded & fix. Yahoo doesn't tell the difference between
spam/forwarded spam 
Alternatively google around...the director of Anti-Spam at Yahoo has his
email address on some mailing lists and posts to them....he's actually
responsive (2days ish) and quite helpful (me != proxy). There are also
several yahoo employees on nanog who are also tired of the issues
sending email to Yahoo and can get some stuff done.
-r