Trouble Sending Email?

You don't send spam - or even know anyone that sends spam... yet you have emails bouncing back to you saying it was rejected due to spam? Or worse yet, you send emails to known good addresses, possibly even as a reply to a message that was sent to you, and it fails as if the server doesn't exist? You're not alone. It happens to just about everyone. If it hasn't happened to you, then it probably will. The reason is simple. Some combination of factors with your email caused the receiving server to mistake it as spam. If this happens to you, it could be a fluke. Try sending your message again in a little while. If it happens again, then there's likely a problem that isn't going away - for a while at least.

First of all, if this is happening with emails to us, we do have other ways you can email us. Namely, our contact forms on this site. No matter what the reason your emails are getting rejected, a message sent to us using our forms will get through. If you've been given an error message, please include this in your message to us. We will whitelist your email address and then we'll use the error info you provide to get to the bottom of why your emails aren't being delivered.

What makes a legitimate email look like spam?
The most common reason is blocklists. These lists contain IP addresses that have been branded as suspicious. IP addresses can get listed for a variety of reasons. Some are listed because they've been found to have a mass-mailing virus. Some have sent email to so-called "spam traps". Others might not be listed directly, but there might be one or more addresses very close to it that is listed. If your own IP address or the address of the server that is sending your mail is on a blocklist your mail could get rejected. Then there are also proprietary blacklists maintained by individual email providers. An IP can end up on these if the provider receives complaints from users, or if they simply receive a large volume of junk that is believably "spoofed" to look like it's from you, your domain, your server, etc.

How to find out if your IP is on a blocklist... First, you need to know what your IP address is. We could tell you how to find yours, but it's probably easier to just tell you what it is. Currently, your IP address is 38.103.63.18. We say "currently" because if you're still using dial-up or otherwise have a dynamic IP address, it may not be the same as it was when your mail was rejected. The next obvious question is how do you know if your IP is dynamic? The shortest answer is, if you have a static (always the same) IP address, you'd probably know because you are probably paying your ISP extra for it. If you have a dynamic IP, but you're on a broadband connection, there's a good chance it hasn't changed yet. So, enter your IP address into the search field on a site like SenderBase. If it's listed (ignore PBL and DNSBL results, more on that in a bit), contact your ISP to have them de-list the IP address and find out what you can do to get on a different IP in the meantime. Only the owner of an IP address can hope to have success de-listing an address. If you see a positive result that says PBL or DNSBL, these aren't true blacklists, and in theory all dynamic IP addresses on the planet should show up on those. Positive PBL/DNSBL listings should not be contributing to your bouncing unless the server is erroneously treating it as a blacklist, or if you are running your own mail server on a dynamic IP address. The idea there is, if you're running your own mail server, it should be on a static IP address.

If your bounce specifically cited your mail server as the culprit and gave its IP address, it may or may not actually be blacklisted either. To be sure, look it up too by the same method mentioned above. If it tells you that the IP is blacklisted, contact your email provider. They should take steps to get your server de-listed. Now here's where the headaches will begin... There's a very good chance you won't find your mail server on a blocklist. Why? Your email administrator is likely keeping up on blocklists and getting servers de-listed as they appear (perfectly innocent servers get erroneously listed all the time). So something else is probably the problem.

Unfortunately, our own struggles with spam have revealed that the most strict spam filters that do not reject legitimate emails still let approximately 30% of the spam through. Once you go stricter than that, legitimate emails start bouncing. But when you run a server that gets say, a modest 4 million junk emails a day, a spam filter that lets 30% in still gets well over a million spam emails a day. That much junk slows down servers and eats a ton of bandwidth. Take those million or so emails that get through a day. Lets assume they average 25 or so kilobytes each (some junk is smaller, and some is way bigger). That isn't very significant for the handful that end up in an individual account. But for the entire server, that's roughly 25 gigabytes of server space. In terms of bandwidth, it's at least double that figure (half for the incoming message itself, the other half for one download by the recipient). All users suffer the effects of this. Then if you factor in software costs to fight the problem, cost of new servers and more bandwidth to compensate for the problem, manpower spent, etc., that 30% that sneaks through is still way too much spam!

The only way around this is to make spam filters more strict. And they have to be strict enough to continue to reject spam the next time the spammers adapt to techniques for fighting spam. Unfortunately, in this effort, many legitimate emails become casualties. And bouncing emails isn't necessarily the best solution either. Since a true spam email never comes from the address or the server it says it came from (spoofing), bouncing the email would mean inconveniencing an innocent third party with a bounce message. To avoid this another technique has become common: blackhole filtering. Servers using this technique will simply drop the connection for an incoming connection branded as spam. This keeps bounces from bouncing around the internet, eating up more bandwidth, eating up more drive space, causing more headaches etc. In the case of a legitimate blocked in this manner, you'll likely get a "failure" email that says something to the effect of all attempts to contact the receiving server failed.

It all boils down to how much your email smells like spam to the receiving server. Various common factors that incoming emails are weighed against include:

• Blocklists
  Many servers use blocklist services like SpamCop, SpamHaus and others. These are typically given a high weight when being considered by spam filters, as accepting an email from one listed on one of these "real-time blocklists" could potentially be dangerous. The other category is
• Volume of email received from your server
  Many email systems are on shared servers with up to several other domains' email systems on the same server. If someone - or multiple people on one or more of those domains is not very responsible with mailing lists
• Bayesian filtering
  Bayesian filtering uses statistical analysis to determine spam probability based on content, keywords, frequency of such things showing up in spam, etc.
• Reverse DNS lookup
  This check will fail if the IP address of your server does not have a hostname associated with it (e.g. server.yourmailserver.net - or blahblah.yourISPnetwork.yourisp.com).
• Open-Relay Servers
  If your mail server is an open relay server, you're likely getting more failures than successes when sending email. The reason is that anyone can send email through an open-relay server without authentication. For this reason, most email providers have been moving to closed-relay servers (requiring SMTP authentication) and rejecting all mail that appears to come from an open-relay system.
• ORDB
  This is a once-popular, but now-defunct blocklist. They ceased operations in late 2006. Many admins left ORDB in their filters. And it didn't cause any problems until recently. It now returns bogus positive results, in an apparent effort to get administrators to remove it from their filters. If a mail server uses ORDB, and gives it any spam weight whatsoever to ORDB, a great many legitimate emails will smell more like spam than they should. This isn't definitive, but it seems to most commonly occur with mail sent from servers that were on an open-relay at some point near the demise of ORDB. If your emails fail an ORDB check (and ultimately leads to it bouncing), this does not mean there is something wrong with your server. Quite the contrary... the server on the receiving end that used it in their filter is not properly configured.
  
  What sucks here is that using ORDB does make more spam look like spam. Which is probably one reason why it is still being used by many providers. In our mail systems, giving ORDB any weight at all can help catch up to 100% of that 30% that the more responsible configuration misses. But, this WILL result in many, many legitimate emails bouncing. So, unless one is to go with a whitelist-only mail system, using ORDB is not worth risking missing countless legitimate emails.
  
  

But, what can you do if this is happening? If you're a GI Hosting (and Email) Customer, let us know, and whether you're getting the bounces, or getting reports of bounces. If the former, well look into the problem, try to determine the cause, and take steps to correct the problem. Such action usually includes contacting providers that are rejecting your email, and if necessary moving your server to a different IP while the current IP is pending de-listing (if it actually is blocklisted). If you're the one being contacted about email to you bouncing back, let us know and we'll likely attempt to obtain sample bounces from the sender, and tweak your filters accordingly.

If we do not provide your email services, we can help you too. Just contact us, let us know what the problem is and one of our representatives will work with you to track down the problem and work to solve it as quickly as possible.