Sorry of this is off topic:
So at my workplace we have a fairly fast moving newsletter machine that people sign up for.
Rules are followed as in: Mail isn't sent unless people request it, an address is removed upon subscription cancel, and addresses are removed after the 3rd bounce.
Life was reasonably well up until about a week ago at which point we moved this newsletter machine and gave it a new address. At this point most of the major ISPs see a bunch of email coming from this new address and proceed to block it. I understand completely why they block this kind of traffic but I am wondering what we can do proactively to prove we are good internet citizens to minimize these problems in the future?
We have already published SPF records and made sure forward and reverse entries exist, are there other things that can be done?
On another side note, if anyone has information on how to get whitelisted (or DeBlacklisted
) from Hotmail, MSN, Earthlink, AOL, Yahoo!, etc feel free to email offlist...
Thanks!
Sorry of this is off topic:
Try SPAM-L, a lot of overlap between that and this group, but it exists for
these issues, NANOG doesn't (unless you are sending so much email it
adversely affects network stability).
On another side note, if anyone has information on how to get
whitelisted (or DeBlacklisted
) from Hotmail, MSN, Earthlink,
AOL, Yahoo!, etc feel free to email offlist...
Hotmail, and AOL, provide various feedback systems, the SPAM-L archive
discusses relative merits. The more clueful of the providers return all you
need to know in the reject message.
Ultimately if you are sending bulk email, and a significant number of the
recipients claim it is unsolicited, the big email providers are going to
block you, whether the recipients are right or wrong about the solicited
nature of the list.
Hotmail silently bitbucket email from us regularly (we have a lot of rarely
used forwards, so the little bits of spam that leak through count badly
against our email server), we've given up on Hotmail, but I think it is
possible to ask for a whitelisting.
Wil,
Here's an overview I've written on how to deal with this with regard to AOL:
http://www.spamresource.com/2007/01/how-to-deliver-mail-to-aol.html
If the online forms don't work for AOL, or you get declined, the next
step would be to call the phone number in AOL's domain registration.
The people on the other end will ask a bunch of questions, then you'll
go into a queue and get a call back from somebody with more
information.
Hope that helps.
It's certainly worth trying to ask for more help over on SPAM-L, but
it'd pretty much be a coin toss as to whether or not you'd get useful
advice, or simply be accused of being a dirty rotten spammer.
Regards,
Al Iverson
It is good practice to confirm the subscription.
As you have moved your operation, do a black-hole list search available at:
http://www.moensted.dk/spam/
-Doug