Hello list
I am writing on behalf of a colleague who is operating a small hosting business, mainly focused on the setup of the cms and consulting. He is not on the list and asked me to put his words into it. He had the following dispute with an ISP, but I will let him speak (translation via deepl reviewed by me).
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We run a small hosting business on three managed servers, which we rent from a well-known Swiss ISP and host our customers (SMEs and individuals) there. We have had the misfortune three times that the IP of one of our servers got on the blacklist "UCEprotect" through no fault of our own: http://www.uceprotect.net
In each of these cases a Zurich-based ISP was at fault, who apparently is involved in this blacklist - he didn't want to tell us how exactly, but in the first case he still apologized and he was able to remove the IP from the blacklist at short notice without any problems. Therefore we assume that he has a great influence there. The first times the IP was blacklisted because there was a chaos with a telephone system (short: bounces on non-existent addresses). Last week the IP came back on UCEprotect because a customer had edited his SPF entry incorrectly (he forgot to enter the IP of the server) - a single mail from our customer to a customer of the mentioned Zurich provider was already enough for an entry on the RBL. There was neither a spam dispatch nor a spamtrap; the wrong SPF automatically led to a blacklisting of the whole IP with more than 200 hosting customers, who then of course got mail problems.
It would be normal and justifiable for a mail to be classified as spam because of a wrong SPF record. However, we find it very questionable that a whole IP is "dragged into the abyss" because of this. Especially since we have been fighting against spam for almost 25 years, keeping our servers clean and thus "fighting on the same side", it is all the more irritating to have such obstacles put in the way by this provider. The fact that customers can adjust the DNS entries and thus the SPF record themselves is normal for many providers. A single hosting customer's mistake should not also affect his provider and dozens of other customers.
The methods used for an automatic entry on the blacklist UCEprotect seem at least questionable. I would like to show the provider that he means well, but that it can easily hit the wrong people - and would be grateful for input. After the first case still said "sorry, you've been good to me", there are no more answers to the question whether he really considers these methods to be useful. What do you think can be done here? I don't have time and money for a legal dispute, and blocking any traffic to his IPs to prevent damage to our IPs would probably not be clean either.
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So, what is your opinion on the behavior of this ISP? Me, Urs, I am with my colleague and I think, it's not acceptable to block a whole IP just while receiving one or a small number of mail without a correct SPF.
Thank you your thoughts, I will collect it and send it to my colleague.
Urs Müller Schweizerische Bundesbahnen SBB Senior Architekt / Product Owner Informatik Operations-Management / CYBER Poststrasse 6 - Ostermundigen, 3000 Bern 65 urs.bf.mueller@sbb.ch / www.sbb.ch