Welcome to Nowhere

So. Here’s a thinggy for long-time readers. Remember the epic server move of August of last year? You know, the one where everything and its asociated user had to be shuffled off a server I no longer had any actual stake in inside of 5 minutes–and where I was met head on by an email blockage issue? Sure you do. But I’ll let you refresh yourself just in case you don’t. In the meantime, I’ll catch things up–because the stats tell me I’m not the only one with the issue.

In August, when I fired up this server, I was slapped with an IP address–well, several IP addresses, actually–that had a poor reputation, according to senderbase.org. Here’s the problem with that. Because they decided my reputation–which they don’t really tell you a whole lot about–was poor, several major ISP’s and a few smaller ones were permanently rejecting email sent to them with the ever so helpful message that if I believed this message was rejected in error, to please contact the recipient using alternate means. Helpful, but not really. I fought with it for a few weeks and got pretty much nowhere. Senderbase doesn’t actually have any way to contact them. No support address, or any real contact page, and the information I was able to piece together on a possible contact got me pretty much no response. A back and forth with the guys running the datacenter this server’s sitting in told me they have just as much luck with these folks. So figuring I’d deal with it later, after I finished ironing out the kinks that came with a move of this variety, I was handed a new IP address from a different block entirely. This one, at least, had a neutral reputation when I got it–and it’s supposedly only improved from there, but again, I have no idea according to what metrics.

So I set email to go out using only that IP address and pretty much forgot about it. Because it worked. so I saw no need to continue aiming guns at heads. ISP’s that used to take one look at the server and laugh their asses off now accepted email from that same server as though there was nothing at all wrong in the world. I was a happy geek. Still am, but largely because the damn thing still does what I told it to. So fast forward to this week. I’m doing a check on other things, just to make sure I don’t need to go behind the scenes and do some sort of wicked nifty cool brand of tweeking. Which, okay, is major amounts of fun–but only after generous amounts of caffeine and nearly as generous amounts of vodka. Or a vodrumoke, if one would prefer (all of 3 people might actually catch that reference, including the one what said it). So it’s during this routine scan for breakage that I decide, hey, let’s take the server’s primary IP address and run it by those bastards at Senderbase. Let’s see if they’ve wised up any. Hint: if you thought for even 2 seconds that they might have, I’m going to have to revoke your license to read this blog.

Not only did they decide the primary IP address of this server still has a “poor” reputation, but they escentially also decided to forget that I used that IP address for pretty much anything. Where before, I could get an idea of how much email has been blocked by Senderbase, so far as it’s concerned now, I’ve got nothing. Senderbase lets me ask it about my server’s IP, then sneers at me and says “Look, bud. I don’t actually know the guy, but I hear he’s no bloody good. Hey–that’s just what I hear, alright? Whatcha want?”. It can’t even tell me what the IP’s DNS reverses too, which is–well, odd and quite doable using the good IP, but hey, whatever. I just find it highly interesting that, 5 months on, it’s forgotten pretty much everything about this server except its reputation–which supposedly improves over time, but I’m still waiting. In the meantime, if you run your own mail server and actually rely on Senderbase to handle even part of your antispam policies, you’re an idiot. And if I can find some way of getting email to folks what use you and not actually have to go through you, consider it done. Now. About that vodrumoke.