I love breaking in a new server. It’s kind of nifty cool. What’s not so nifty cool about it is breaking in a new server when you kind of need to move some of your production stuff over to it, like, 5 minutes ago. That’s where I spent the last week or so. Everything I maintain directly, for my own benefit–or, now, for May’s as well–has a new address. Unfortunately for everything I maintain, that new address apparently used to be owned by someone with a less than stellar performance record. So when it got handed to me, I got to find out just what *not* to do as a sysadmin. I mean I knew most of it already from dealing with previous sysadmins, but that’s a rant for when I’m less than sober.
I’ve been used to the standard problems with email, especially with email coming from a new–or in some cases, previously used–IP. Hotmail doesn’t like recently asigned IP addresses, AOL tends to throw a bit of a hissy, and most smaller services tend to temporarily fail mail coming to them from new servers on the first pass–they call that greylisting. And then there’s the odd duck who decides “Oh, you’ve never had this IP before. I’m just going to pretend I don’t know you.”.
I can deal with that. It’s called just keep queueing up the mail, and eventually, they’ll like you enough that a metric shit ton of it will hit them in the box. But this one’s new, at least for me. Apparently, senderbase.org is not actually a strict blacklisting service, a la SpamCop. It’s an IP reputation tracking service, whatever the hell that means. Which, again, is awesome. Until you start to factor in, uh, companies will permanently (as in, 5xx error) reject mail from your server if senderbase doesn’t like you. Which is all well and good and amazing, if you’re the lazy type. And here’s a fantastic little kick in the teeth to go along with the kick in the geek nads. They don’t actually give you a whole lot of info on how, exactly, you’re supposed to *improve* your server’s reputation, so companies who use them don’t permanently reject your face off–especially when the only way I know they track such things is when companies receive email and report such things to them. So you’re sitting there, trying to figure out exactly what in the 7 levels of hell you broke when you set up your server, and all you have to go on is, well, this.
2012-08-14 11:41:59 1T1JFP-0006mG-18 ** wgrignon@wikiscribeit.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp: SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host smtp.secureserver.net [216.69.186.201]: 554-m1pismtp01-003.prod.mesa1.secureserver.netn554 Your access to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTA’s poor reputation. If you believe that this failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means.
Helpful. Really. Extremely Now, uh, kindly tell me how I’m supposed to get in touch with the moron who says so so I can point out to ’em that, hey senderbase guy? Yeah. IP’s a week old from where I’m sitting. Little help? Nah, I didn’t think so. And that’s where it sits. About 20 minutes on Google tells me, uh, not much. Apparently your IP reputation’s supposed to improve over time, but since everyone I know tracks that kind of thing has apparently blocked my face, I’m still curious how that happens. Unless senderbase just occasionally develops amnesia. Which, I suppose, is possible–they don’t say. So I’ve been smacked by senderbase.org, and the only counter is, uh, an unknown variable. God I’d love to be that lazy with this server. But I’m not paying to do it.