getting greylisted :~(

[Oops_my_bad]

I have noticed that recently more and more of our mail being sent out is getting "greylisted". With each undeliverable message being bounced it points me to this webpage. As far as I know my mail server is setup properly and securely (hell I aint that stoopid) but cannot for the life of me think what else the problem could be.

 

Has anyone else had any issues with this?

[Andi]

We had similar issues with getting blacklisted, but I was advised to set out Exchange server to send mail via our ISP as a Smarthost. We haven't had the problem since.

[Oops_my_bad]

Thanks for that. We just have a dedicated line for Internet and dont get provided with an SMTP server (hence why we use our own (and that's how we like it))

 

Oh well... guess I will have to go over our mail server with a fine tooth comb. ffs

[dave.81]

We got blacklisted by a few of the major web based email providers and took use nearly a month to be removed. I had to change our firewall system as it was allowing the boarders machines to send too much spam.

[Oops_my_bad]

Don't get me wrong.. email does seem to get through after a retry or 2(hence "grey" listing). But for some reason it's getting throttled.

 

As an aside it's nice to see them spelling "grey" the proper way

[Oops_my_bad]

I'm still having major trouble with this

 

I've rang up some places where mail is being bounced back and they say they don't use greylisting. Now I know for a fact we have no greylisting going on at all on our MTA's here so perhaps they're bullsh*ting

 

Is there anything I can check for? Is there some sort of configuration issue here?

 

I am using exchange server 2003 which relays mail via a smarthost to our surfcontrol riskfilter appliance. This appliance is set to only allow relay from the exchange server.

[Ric_]

If a few retries are making delivery successful, it may be that you have connectivity issues or dodgy DNS.

 

Are the bounces coming from your server or the recipients? Is it certain addresses (not just domains) that bounce? Are the messages particularly large?

 

There is a healthcheck tool (whose name escapes me at present) that MS do for Exchange... try running that - it takes a while!

[dhicks]

I've seen some bounced emails on our system, too. It would seem we're getting listed as a source for spam. I have a nasty feeling this is because some machines are infected with the avpo.exe trojan - time for a mass-reimaging...

 

--

David Hicks

[Oops_my_bad]

Thanks ric.. i'll try that

 

dhicks if you share your internet connection with other schools (perhaps via your LEA) then it could be a rogue spam bot in another school - net effect of course is the whole LEA has trouble with greylisting. Second to a mail server misconfiguration, I strongly suspect this is what's happening in my case

[bossman]

@TeddyKGB:

 

Whitepaper which i am sure you have read but if not it's here: http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/whitepaper.html

 

hope this helps

[dhicks]

TeddyKGB: Good point, but we're a private school and have no LEA to bother about.

 

--

David Hicks

[Geoff]

dhicks, your postmaster@ and abuse@ addresses are broken.

 

RCPT TO:
450-4.2.1 The Gmail user you are trying to contact is receiving 
450-4.2.1 mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from 
450-4.2.1 being delivered. Please resend your message at a later 
450-4.2.1 time; if the user is able to receive mail at that time, 
450 4.2.1 your message will be delivered.

[dhicks]

> dhicks, your postmaster@ and abuse@ addresses are broken.

 

Thanks, I'll have to look in to that. Our email system is currently in a complete pickle - a couple of dozen staff members have accounts on our Exchange server (altonconvent.com) and use Outlook to read email, whereas others use gmail accounts. We want to have our system read all email sent to gmail and sort it properly into user's mailboxes, ready to be read with something web-based that doesn't cost us anything. There seems to be about half a dozen steps that email needs to go through for us to do that, though, which takes a bit of getting my head around.

 

--

David Hicks