outgoing mail - blocked as spam?

[dbperry]

I am considering moving my domain to BlueHost.

One of my biggest problems with my current host is that my outgoing e-mail is being blocked as spam at some of the largest ISPs. I believe that the problem is this:

Some other users of my hosting company have ALL of their e-mail forwarded to their ISP account.
The ISP then sees that mail as coming from the hosting company's server, since that is the most recent sending server (although not the originator).
The ISP also sees all of the spam embedded in the users' mail stream.
The ISP then blocks all mail from the hosting company server, accusing the hosting company server as a spam source.
Since my legitimate mail to other customers on the same ISP is coming from the same server, my mail is blocked.

Obviously the ISP is using a horrible policy of blocking e-mail without trying to detect the actual originating server (which is in the e-mail header).

But it would be easier to get Iraq to govern themselves than to get the ISP (comcast, hotmail, etc.) to change their policy.

Has this ever happened at BlueHost?

[Early Out]

I've seen it happen a handful of times with Bluehost servers (I'm a Comcast customer, but use the BH servers for my primary email), but submitting the server IPs to Comcast's "unblock" web form took care of it quickly.

Actually, the complaints at Comcast have gotten loud enough that I believe they're getting a little more selective about "slapping the cuffs" on other mail servers. I think the straw that broke the camel's back was when Comcast blacklisted a couple of the Yahoo mail servers. Lots of very angry customers!

Your analysis of what's been causing this corresponds precisely to what I've seen reported in the Comcast forums, and sometimes confirmed by the Comcast mods over there.

[JoeP]

I've had this same problem for some time and have just procrastinated on finding a solution...
1) How do you find your box's IP address?
2) Is there a url for the comcast unblock request?

I have a number of other ISPs that seem to be blocking as well, but the effect is not near as great as it is for comcast.
Thanks,
joe

[Early Out]

What you need to get your hands on is the bounce message from Comcast, which tells you what IP address they've blocked. You can't just use the IP address for your box. Outgoing BH email goes out through a series of mail servers. Which server your mail goes out through can change from one message to the next, and it's not related to what box you're on.

The bounce message will contain a line like this:

host gateway-s.comcast.net [63.240.76.26]: 550 216.148.221.135 blocked by ldapu=rblmx,dc=comcast,dc=net -> BL004 Blocked for spam.

This tells you that the blocked IP address is 216.148.221.135 (this is NOT a BH mail server - just an example).

Once you've retrieved the IP address from the bounce message, go to http://www.comcastsupport.com/rbl to request its removal.

[KenJackson]

My experience relates to this.

Comcast is my ISP and I previously had my personal email addresses redirected to my Comcast mailbox. But when I set up a new domain parked on my BH account, I sent myself a test email using an address in the new domain as my "From" address.

It bounced. Comcast said it looked like spam, even though it was sent by me, to me, via an authenticating SMTP server. Then I remebered a couple people telling me their emails to me had also bounced.

I immediately switched all my redirectors to a BH hosted mailbox, which solved that problem.

But this experience gave me a little more appreciation of what Comcast is doing. On the one hand I found the occasional false positive to be unacceptable. But on the other, I started getting a lot of spam that Comcast had been blocking. I now really appreciate the effort Comcast is going to to eradicate spam. (Even though I still can't accept the occasional false positive.)