email forwarding and mailspike

[dhodgson]

Hi there:

I spent some time today reading through the support forums but didn't see anything that quite matched what I am experiencing. Maybe someone can help me.

I have been using ZoneEdit to forward my domain emails to my local ISP email account. It's been working great for many years, but during the past week or so, my email slowly started to disappear. At first it was a not even noticeable, but by the start of this week nothing is being forwarded. I tested it a few times, sending emails from different email accounts but no luck. I played around with some TXT records but also no luck.

The really weird thing is that I never got a bounce-back. I called my ISP and they were finally able to get a bounce-back with some diagnostics. It looks like Mailspike is telling my ISP that the ZoneEdit IP has a bad reputation? (see attached)

Any ideas?
Dave

 

[Chris Cherry]

Hi Dave,

That is not uncommon, though we do try and avoid it. Email forwarding servers often get a bad reputation due to its very nature. They act as a middle man which forwards emails on to their destination.

When spam happens to get through our filters, it is then forwarded on to the destination mailbox. Many users happen to see this spam and click the "mark or flag" as spam within their destination mailbox. That, in turn, can lead to lowering our reputation since we're the server which last handled the email.

Most spam that gets through these days is from compromised mailboxes who've had their password hacked or from users that fell prey to phishing emails.

These blocks are usually temporary or require us to submit a delisting at the spam filter provider.

Checking the URL in the bounce message (http://mailspike.org/iplookup.html) I can see that our IP (64.68.198.23) is not currently listed.

 

[dhodgson]

Hi Chris:

Thanks for the reply! Yes, I submitted a request to Mailspike yesterday to get 64.68.198.23 de-listed. That seems to have gone through. Unfortunately they have also listed 64.68.198.24 (another of your IP's), so I repeated the process this morning for that one as well. So far, so good.... the mail is starting to flow again.

Should I be adding anything to my email forwarding record to help prevent this? I did notice in the past that a few spoof emails were sent using my virtual email address and bounced back... not from my actual email account, just the virtual one.

Dave

 

[Chris Cherry]

Nice catch & thank you for that.

You solely wouldn't be the cause of the blocking. It's our system as a whole and you are likely not the only one who is forwarding emails through us to the same ISP or other ISP/Hosts that use mailspike as an anti-spam measure.

While you do get the fallout of bounced emails from someone spoofing your email address, the server which sends those spoofed messages wouldn't be ours or your ISP's. I've added a TXT record to your domain which you can copy and use with any other domains that use our mailmap forwarding service. It will help, but not be a complete resolution to the situation.

 

[dhodgson]

Excellent, thanks for all your help!

Dave