email from actinic treated as spam

[storerat]

Hi

We are getting occasional shipping notification emails rejected (spamcop) and had another today (http://www.0spam.com/).

If the same email is sent from my email client, there does not appear to be a problem.

Has anyone found that emails sent from the catalogue to some email addresses are treated as spam and if so, did you work out a solution?

Thanks.

k

[Jan]

This happened to me the other day as well, same email address but sent from the PC worked.

Regards,

[storerat]

Hi Jan
was it blocked by spamcop or did you get a request to confirm the originating email address (like 0spam)?

Our outgoing email is handled by bt servers, so I'm not sure what is going on when the actinic smtp settings are set to 127.0.0.1 in order for emails to send ...isn't that the local machine? If I try to use the bt smtp server address, all emails from actinic fail to send. Perhaps it has something to do with this in that spam filters don't like the smtp setting?
How does actinic get email to send without using standard smtp addresses?

Another thing that puzzles me is why some orders have 'order received' notifications sent out (and we get a copy) whilst other orders do not.

It's a bit troubling when customers phone up and want to know why they got a transaction notification from the bank but nothing else to indicate we have received and are processing the order.

Haven't had time to think about it yet and don't want to 'break' anything messing around with settings.

cheers

k

[storerat]

here's another type of mail error we are starting to see with some of the auto generated catalogue order notifications:

********************************************

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

[I removed email address...]
SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:
host mailin-04.mx.aol.com [64.12.138.152]: 554-:
(CON:B1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554conb1.html
554 TRANSACTION FAILED

********************************************

I tried resending the order notification from my standard email client and haven't had it bounce yet.

[Jan]

Mine just never arrived.

Regards,

[pinbrook]

Check to determine whether all of your rejected emails are going to AOL customers only.

If they are you will have to talk to your host as AOL are very particular about the mail they will accept or decline.

[storerat]

Hi there,
just went through and checked:

aol.com (5)
iol.ie (1)
hp.com (1)
supanet.com (3)(spamcop)
macunlimited.net (1)
ukonline.co.uk (1)
hotmail.com (1)
yahoo.com (1)
comcast.net (2)
dbcoll.com (1) (0spam verification request)

Doesn't seem to be an obvious repeatable pattern - maybe a combination of things? I've checked things like users putting commas in email addresses by mistake - but the iol.ie address always fails through the catalogue but works from my mail client both based on info@wildchicken - the difference I've noticed is the smtp server settings - actinic uses 127.0.0.1 whilst my email client uses bt smtp server setting.

A total of 17 instances in the last 18 days

[DimTim]

As Jo said, AOL do impose their very own set of rules on email going to their servers (a right pain in the butt if you ask me).

Unless I am missing something and apologies if you already know:

Many antispam services check blackhole listings to see if the sending server is recorded as having been sending spam. Spamcop is just one of those blackhole lists.

To check if your server is listed, get the IP number of your server by placing an order and looking at the headers of the email (you will find instructions if you Google for it). Then head over to http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml and type your IP number in there. Spamcop will tell you if your server is blacklisted. On Spamcop, a server is delisted 24 hours after spam stops being sent through that server so you might not find it listed even though it once was.

If you are not on your own dedicated server, spam might be being sent by somebody else on the same server. If that is the case, have strong words with your hosts.

There are many blackhole lists though. On the results page there is a link "Senderbase Lookup" which may show if the IP is listed elsewhere in the "Realtime Blacklists" table.

To be fair though, in my experience, not many antispam systems notify of a failure because of blackhole listing.

Edited to add:
If you find your server is blacklisted, have words with your host.

Also, if you can't get anywhere checking this, post your URL here and I will place a dummy order and check the results.

[storerat]

Thanks Tim.
I've already been in touch with my hosting company and indeed, the server had been temporarily listed but was supposedly marked for delisting within the hour. The day after I tried again - same story... mail bounced.

There does not seem to be much I can do about it with regards to shared hosting if someone else is abusing the system.
Not quite ready for the shift to dedicated server - got enough to do keeping things together as is without having to get into plesk and server administration (not to mention the way costs pile up if you go dedicated..."want a firewall, sure, no problem, that's another £150 a month on top of the £300 for the box" sort of thing).

Maybe next year!

[pinbrook]

Check us out in the New Year, we are going to have dedicated servers driven by our control panel.

Thus you get the benefits of your own server, whilst being able to share all our facilities ie firewall, spam filters etc and have everything icon driven.....drool drool....you'll love it!

[DimTim]

Thanks Tim.
I've already been in touch with my hosting company and indeed, the server had been temporarily listed but was supposedly marked for delisting within the hour. The day after I tried again - same story... mail bounced.

There does not seem to be much I can do about it with regards to shared hosting if someone else is abusing the system.
Not quite ready for the shift to dedicated server - got enough to do keeping things together as is without having to get into plesk and server administration (not to mention the way costs pile up if you go dedicated..."want a firewall, sure, no problem, that's another £150 a month on top of the £300 for the box" sort of thing).

Maybe next year!

You are welcome of course. )

Though I disagree that there is nothing you can do about it. Your hosts have contracted to deliver a service, and that includes an email system that works. I would be shouting at them. It is their duty to ensure that their services are not abused by spammers. Clearly I have no idea who your hosts are but a small company might be a better bet than the large one because they cannot afford to loose customers.

Rant over, apologies.

There is another possibility. In network setup there is facility to set up the SMTP server, can this not be set up to send via another service? I'm thinking that maybe the host has another server which is not blacklisted. I wonder if the mail server THEY send through is ever black listed. ( nudge nudge ) Might be worth applying some pressure if Actinic can handle a remote SMTP.

I'm pretty sure it can, can anybody confirm that this is possible ?