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Re: 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP

  • From: Alan Spicer
  • Date: Sat Sep 24 21:50:20 2005


----- Original Message ----- From: "Omar Thameen" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <[email protected]>; "Alan Spicer" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 6:25 AM
Subject: Re: 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP


On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 09:01:40AM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

On 20/09/05, Alan Spicer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I wonder if anyone with Bellsouth.net can tell me why this ip or /24
>
> 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24)
>
> would be blocked from sending SMTP to bellsouth.net customers.
>

That's a large (and quite good) webhost called pair.com, which also
hosts the Pittsburgh IX (pitx.net)

http://www.pair.com/support/notices/blocked-email.html

Blocking is fine - happens.  Postmaster and other role accounts not
replying at all to email that they're sent is just not a good thing to
do.

This may give you an idea of what issue may be and the response
you're likely to encounter.

Back in June, we contacted Bellsouth postmaster regarding their
filtering of SMTP connections (i.e., so that connection attempts
hang until the timeout is reached), and received this reply from
[email protected]:

We will configure our settings for your company on our
Filtering mechanism to 50 messages within a 5 minute window.
We ask that you conform to this industry standards regarding
submission of email to our mail server.

As you all know, 50 messages/5 minutes is abysmally low, particularly
for a mailing list hosting provider.  Our requests for higher
threshold and a pointer to the "industry standards" were summarily
dismissed.

If there's a Bellsouth contact with more of a clue on this list,
we'd be happy to meet any reasonable requirements you have for email
delivery.

Omar Thameen
[email protected]
Bellsouth basically told me they were blocking Pair Networks because
the percentage of spam vs non-spam is around 75 - 80%. They say
they are communicating with them on this. Supposedly there was a
conference telephone call this past Thursday 09-22-2005. BS says
they must reduce this spam amount for the block to be removed.

Pair seems to think it is mostly domain customers forwarding their
mailboxes to their BS dot Net email accounts.

This the first I've heard of BS having a 50/5 threshold limit.


---
Alan Spicer ([email protected])