On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 04:32:50AM -0700, Stanislav Sinyagin wrote:
if the server IP address is added to some blacklist like SORBS, the notification is sent to the contact address of the reverse zone.
A properly managed mail server's admin would notice that quite quickly. Infact, I(*) have been listed in ORBS or others in the last few years, usually because of an automated Mailman answer to some spam coming from a spam-trap address, and each time, it was my duty to unlist me, and sometimes ask my service provider to send a nice e-mail.
I am a heavy users of those RBL lists, they offer quite a bit of protection (but not as much as you might think, and with quite a few false positives: greylisting is much more efficient).
If the server is under the ISP's maintenance, the ISP will (supposedly) notice this event and try its best (haha) to remove the server address from that blacklist.
... supposedly.
The reason why the customer doesn't want to go through smtp.green.ch anyway is because green apparently runs a non standard Microsoft SMTP server which has the interesting property of either dropping mails silently, or, more frequently, bouncing them as spam.
Contacting green support personal was replied with "it's the remote SMTP destination which refuses the mail, not us" -- although sending directly to the remote SMTP destination works. So it must be a modification made by the non standard Microsoft SMTP server which triggers the problem at the remote site, or they can't read their own logs.
However, some (other) SMTP servers will refuse mail directly coming from this customer because it has reverse PTR not in the domain.
The temporary workaround for this was to use yet-another-smart-host from another company, not green they have a subscription to. This works quite well, but is a bit puzzling.
(*) happy net2000 (cablecom) customer, with properly set up reverse, thanks net2000.
The last issue I had recently is with Yahoo delaying some of the messages sent to mailing-lists I host, I had to go through an interesting procedure during the last few months to be able to get the opportunity of maybe getting delisted, including a Privacy policy (http://www.alphanet.ch/privacy_policy.html if you are interested).