Black Listed

I recently got a support ticket for an email problem. It seemed that one of our team couldn’t send mail to the mcshi.com domain. The support ticket included the NDR (Non-Delivery Receipt) part of the ticket which included this line: blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=mso,dc=att,dc=net

My initial thought was that we were on a blacklist so I went out to SamSpade.org who is having some real trouble with their site and found that I wasn’t able to even to a RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) check. So I popped over to MX Toolbox and did a RBL check there; which came back clean.

Next step was to look at the logs, sure enough I can see the NDR being generated in the log but unfortunately it’s just not enough info to really know what’s going on. So I open a command prompt and do an nslookup for the MX records of mcshi.com Then I do a Telnet on 25 to the mail server at mcshi.com

Once I was talking to the mail server, I was able to get the actual response from the server and see that it was blocking me for Abuse.

Once I knew that I was indeed being black listed, I knew I should be able to request removal from the black list. So I headed straight to their website which had the contact us link broken. So from there I started googling it and finally came up with a couple of email addresses to try. I sent them an email via my gmail account (my regular account was being blocked) and hoped for the best.

By now it was time to call it a day.

I start the next day by checking the website again and find the “Contact Us” link is now working and there’s a phone number I can call. So I call it and meet with some resistance but once I explain that I work at a church it seems like I’m given some slack. The tech gives me an email address to send a request to be removed from the list, I do so and wait. The next day I get an asking for all the NDR details, so I gather all my results and send them in. Finally I get an email with a link to a web form where I can ask to be removed from the black list.

Finally after two days of work I get an email saying we’d be off this list in the next 36 hours.  It was an exhausting victory, and I was never able to get an answer as to why we was on their black list to begin with. Also it’s funny that there are all these RBL lists out there and we weren’t on any of them. I’m hoping some day there will be a standard for Email that everyone will follow. Right now everyone does it their own way.

Comments

[Karl Grindley]

Do you remember the URL you requested to be delisted from the RBL list? It looks like my micro mail exchanger's IP is also black listed. Seems they don't mind throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Thanks,
Karl

[Craig McElroy]

Thanks for the info as this has recently happened to my mail server as well. Unfortunately, the situation is even worse today as there is no longer even a website available for the domain. I have contacted the only address I could find on the whois record and will be following up with phone calls to any phone numbers I can find and post any relevant information here.