Forums and Blog

Your features list says that SM now supports a "Configurable outbound SMTP IP address *NEW*".  Seeing this, I immediately upgraded to v3.  Had I knows that it only allows you to change the GLOBAL address SMTP appears to send and not for each domain, I would not have upgraded.

This is very misleading and needs to be clarified.  What I had expected to receive was the ability for EACH DOMAIN to identify itself with a different sending SMTP IP like IMail does.  This wouldn't be an issue at all but bigger ISP's like Comcast are now blacklisting based upon the appearance of sending spam.

Allow me to elaborate.  I have a few mailing lists that have a lot of Comcast mail addresses subscribed to them.  These are Boy Scouting related lists and only have about 30 members each.  When I send a message to the list Comcast sees a single bulk precedence message being sent to several of their customers.  I can see where this might appear to be spam in a Nazi kind of way but the bottom line is that I get blacklisted about every two weeks.

I'm a small ISP and don't have the resources to continually be working to get off of Comcast's blacklist.  If you guys could possibly consider adding this behavior to SmarterMail, myself and many other members of the SM community would really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Evans Martin

Evans,

The 3.1 release of SmarterMail has an option to use domain IPs as the sending IP.  That release is set to come out in a few weeks.

Awesome!  Thanks for the info.

Although it will be useful if you only have a few domains, assigning a unique IP address to each domain is simply not scalable.  Hosts that have hundreds or thousands of domains cannot assign an IP to each domain purely to fix the Comcast problem - other solutions need to be found sooner or later.

Note: this is not an SM issue - it is an industry issue with how spam blacklisting and server verifications are working.  With ARIN disallowing the use of dedicated IP address only for hosting, Comcast and others need to get in sync as they are causing more problems then they solve.

Just be aware that if you workaround the issue with unique IP per domain, you are only defering the problem, not fixing it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be, I'm not a huge ISP and my IP address space more than covers my current customer base and the customers that I plan to bring on in the near future.  This being said, I understand that what you are saying is in fact the case but hey, we should be out of IP space by now if we listened to people like you.  I'm in business for today.  Our industry moves WAY too quickly to make plans any farther out than a year.  Thanks for your thoughts though.

Have a good day,
Evans Martin

 

Then will the 3.1 release allow for the HELO hostname to be different per domain also? If not, there is still a problem with the HELO - PTR mismatch

Glad you have a solution for yourself that works.

Not to nitpick, but my suggestion is one that SAVES IP address space, not using it up faster.  I think you got things reversed.

If you are worried about IP space, just NAT all your servers and use just one public IP address (just kidding!)

Would the admin please clarify if version 3.1 will allow the HELO hostname AND the IP address to be set independently for each domain?      I was just told by yahoo that they can't guarantee our email will be whitelisted if we don't use a dedicated IP for each domain.   I may have to switch to other email server to prevent us from getting slammed into bulk folder again.  Maybe the hostname is automatically selected based on dns?  Let me know.

Thank you for your response,
Bruce Kirkpatrick

skyflare wrote:

Would the admin please clarify if version 3.1 will allow the HELO hostname AND the IP address to be set independently for each domain?      I was just told by yahoo that they can't guarantee our email will be whitelisted if we don't use a dedicated IP for each domain.   I may have to switch to other email server to prevent us from getting slammed into bulk folder again.  Maybe the hostname is automatically selected based on dns?  Let me know. Thank you for your response, Bruce Kirkpatrick

Someone at Yahoo is misinformed or simply being deceptive. There is no way they can legitimately do something like that. Almost every, if not all, large scale email provider uses some sort of virtualization where they host multiple domains on a single IP address. If this were the case, then every single domain would need a unique IP address, and there simply arent even close to enough IP addresses to manage that. It is ridiculous for them to claim otherwise.

To actually answer your question, no, the HELO does not reflect each individual IP address. That is a valid point and it probably should, so we will look into adding it in an upcoming minor.

This is a serious issue for me as well.  I feel that the problem is only part of the way fixed.  I can't wait for the update as AOL is currently bouncing my mail because of this.  I sure wish you guys would listen to your user community instead of being so defensive every time something like this is brought up.

Evans Martin

---
EVANS MARTIN <evans@martek.net>
HOSTING: <http://www.martek.net/>
PROGRAMMING: <http://www.martekware.com/>

iPlus Info Browser - http://www.martek.net/Default.aspx?tabid=96
iPB’s IMail Migration Tool, password browser, reporting suite make IPlus Info Browser something no IMail administrator should be without.

iPB for SmarterMail coming soon!  Send questions to evans@martek.net.

I don't think James was being defensive, he was just answering the post.  It wouldn't be possible to have a different IP for every domain.  Even if the Yahoo guy were correct, it would be a pretty ridiculous requirement... perhaps to keep them from having to "guarantee" whitelisting anyone.  We've gotten customers whitelisted ("trusted" or something like that) on AOL without needing a dedicated IP, and AOL tends to edge out Yahoo in being generally evil.

Is AOL bouncing email due to a mismatched PTR/HELO?  That is not listed on their technical requirements page, but perhaps that's not what you're talking about.  If it is, the solution there would be to put all the domains back on the same sending IP (with a PTR that matches your HELO) until ST can allow a different HELO for each sending IP.  I'll be eagerly awaiting that fix which should make the multiple sending IP feature a little more airtight.

http://postmaster.aol.com/guidelines/standards.html

I didn't mean to come off sounding defensive, and I even said the poster was right. We missed that feature and it should be added.

However, it is still my opinion that using a different IP for every domain is giant waste of IPs, and if Yahoo is trying to say it's neccesary, they are lying.


And if AOL is bouncing your messages because of this, they are violating RFC (which shouldn't shock anyone):

   An SMTP server MAY verify that the domain name parameter in the EHLO
   command actually corresponds to the IP address of the client.
   However, the server MUST NOT refuse to accept a message for this
   reason if the verification fails: the information about verification
   failure is for logging and tracing only.

ST-JLance is absolutely right on this one.  As I said way up in this thread, using a separate dedicated IP address for each website hosted is not only impractical, it is directly against current ARIN policy for allocation of IP addresses.

Perhaps Yahoo still has a class B they were lucky to get ahold of when they acquired their hosting subsidiary and is still assigning one IP per website as a competitive advantage but I suspect they are probably simply sloppy/clueless in this area.

Thank you for replying to my post.  I do hope the HELO is an editable field in a near future release...    As for what yahoo said, I've included the exact message I was sent.  We were white-listed, but on a shared HELO + IP for your email server, we don't have control of types of messages sent by other users of that ip and Yahoo clearly states below that they continue to factor this in.  I'm not very aware of the IP situations but isn't IPv6 going make IP concerns go away once compatibility is high enough?  Also, in terms of search engine ranking, many would agree that dedicated IPs or even separate C blocks are better in the present algorithms.  So we already have dedicated IPs for the web sites, but no way to setup email server unless we migrate or wait for smartertools to update.  I hope this info helps someone.  I'd agree that these anti-spam rules are a waste of IPs and money though.

Yahoo said:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

So I assume then you are a shared server with multiple clients using it for email?

If you share an IP with several domains (lists or clients), you may want to segregate your domain/list/newsletter across a different dedicated IP

address(s) to ensure that receivers are marking each mailing on its own merits. If we see both spam and legitimate mail from the same IP address and different senders, their reports of spam will most likely override any positive feedback generated due to the legitimate mail.

Note: If your system has solely dedicated an IP address for mailings from each single domain, your mail will be forwarded to our inbox. If, however, multiple domain mailings or mailings of different criteria are sent from a shared server, forwarded from multiple servers, we will not be able to guarantee that shared IP address will be exempt from the Yahoo! Spamguard filter.

Ok then you are listed as a shared server?

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Brian

Yahoo! Customer Care - Mail Investigations http://abuse.yahoo.com

It doesn't look like it got into the release on the 15th.  Do you have any idea when it is planned?

Thanks,
Evans Martin