Sluggy Emergency Pants

Comments and changes to this ticket

• You flagged this item as spam.
  

  Deleted User August 8th, 2010 @ 03:28 AM

  • Title changed from “Sluggy.net forums don't sent activation e-mail” to “Sluggy.net IP on Spamhaus PBL (blocking forum e-mail delivery in some cases)”
  • Assigned user set to “Brendan W. McAdams”
  • Milestone order changed from “0” to “0”

  I found out why this is -- the sluggy.net server is listed under Spamhaus's Policy Block List (PBL), which is also included in their rather-popular 'zen' (combined) block list. Since switching my personal e-mail over to a VPS, I grabbed a segment of the log from when I tried to resend the activation e-mail:
  

  Aug  8 06:50:52 server postfix/smtpd[3050]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from wouldyoukindly.sluggy.com[174.143.168.248]: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [174.143.168.248] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org; http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=174.143.168.248; from=<SPAM-PROTECTION-REDACTED> to=<SPAM-PROTECTION-REDACTED> proto=ESMTP helo=<wouldyoukindly.sluggy.com>
  

  As a result of this, I've dropped the PBL list from my server -- unless spam becomes a major issue for me, it's obviously too restrictive. So, I do now have that reactivation e-mail, at least. ;-)

  Checking Spamhaus reveals PBL340794 is the reason, and it appears it should be easy to get the specific IP address automatically de-listed. This may also account for some references to sluggy.net forum e-mail being dropped into various spam folders (specifically if thoes spam filters that use/reference Spamhaus as a scoring method).

  A Google search for "slicehost pbl" shows a bunch of curious results. Perhaps I'll end up dropping Spamhaus entirely, if their policies in cases like this are inappropriate.

  Hope this helps with some of the other reported e-mail issues, too.