North American Network Operators Group

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RE: Go daddy mail services admin

  • From: Matthew Huff
  • Date: Wed Oct 01 10:34:38 2008

We encountered some mail systems  where they checked each hop in the received list and if each and every one could not be reverse resolved, the mail would bounce. And even if they resolved, they were checked against the PBL. We had to add some internal mail servers to our external dns because of this. I would have preferred just to let the mail bounce, but since they were customers, we had to bend.

Designing a mail system that paranoid is certainly up to individual sites, but they shouldn't be surprised when legitimate mail bounces. Even if you are doing this, it should be to setup a score and mark the header, rather than bouncing.

----
Matthew Huff       | One Manhattanville Rd
OTA Management LLC | Purchase, NY 10577
www.ox.com         | Phone: 914-460-4039
aim: matthewbhuff  | Fax:   914-460-4139


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Kinz [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 10:17 AM
To: Blake Pfankuch
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Go daddy mail services admin

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 07:21:52AM -0600, Blake Pfankuch wrote:
> Amazingly its not a route problem.  Its actually confirmed an issue
> with the mail server.  Hense me asking for a mail services admin.  The
> issue is confirmed from 3 locations with 3 different ISP's and I do
> actually know whats going on.  I can connect to the server, but it
> will not allow me to send messages, even when authenticated.  Returns
> a 554.  It has been doing this with legitimate mail.  They do not have
> the ability to send outbound as they get a 554 from their home office.
> The secondary smtp server links me to spamhaus saying that it will not
> allow relay based on an existing PBL entry.  The PBL entry is because
> it's a residential DHCP connection, and the PBL entry was put in place
> by the isp.  Please see http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL191963 if
> you have questions.
>
> So.  Again.  Looking for a GoDaddy Mail services Admin.

Hi Blake -

With Godaddy The 554 code is a tipoff.
Does the error also contain the text:
    SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
    host smtp.where.secureserver.net [xx.xx.xx.xx]:
    554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content


GoDaddy has an unusual policy of rejecting any email that mentions anything that resolves to an IP address on the PBL list

Note this means any text string with the email body itself, not the originating IP of the email.

Any text, a URL or a even a dotted quad that resolves to the PBL list will cause the email to blocked.

By way of example, this policy blocks emails from amazon ec2 merchants even if the email only mentions a web site hosted at ec2, and the email itself is from a static web server with proper MX records.

They have been contacted multiple times over the years about this issue and refuse to change their policy.  The PBL list explicitly describes how to use their list and this way of using it is incorrect.  The PBL list is supposed to be used to check the IP address of the system actually delivering the email to your server, not the contents of the email.

Based on their long term refusal to adjust their policy to conform to PBL intended usage of the list I suspect this issue cannot be corrected.  The only answer I have found is to inform the affected people they have to move from GoDaddy to a company that does a better job to correct the problem.

If this is NOT the issue creating your problem, then you may be able to get GoDaddy to do something to help.

Good luck.
Jeff Kinz.