Questions[blacklist-prevention](server)

My side job is to admin my wife's company domain. It's only used as a domain name for Google mail and tools (slides, docs, etc...).

Although she used her domain for email for many years without any issues, we apparently made the mistake of leaving the web part with a parked website. Last week, a Fortune 500 company, our main customer, changed their spam filter and her email are getting blocked. Email is required to submit business proposal.

http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/ lists every list as green for our domain, except uribl. uribl shows us on the multi and black lists.

I've put a request to delist and the very fine folks at http://uribl.com answered with:

Status: Rejected

Reason: what kind of business has a parked web page? - will expire

No spam has ever been sent from this domain. It doesn't have any webserver to be compromised, no file transfer. It only ever sent Google email from her account, to a handful of customers, and was not compromised.

My question is: What would a decent sysadmin do in such a situation? I tried putting a real website (it's up now), and re-asked to be delisted, but I've got a feeling the kind of person that would refuse delisting the first time round with a pedantic and rhetoric question will not be moved.

Is the ability to deliver a real business email from one's legit domain really in the hands of some random person managing a minor spam blacklist? (I know it sounds like a rant, I'm trying to keep my emotion in check, but this is probably a major risk to half a year salary)

Below is a redacted snapshot of multirbl.valli.org showing the details I have:

Edit: Answering @anx, whois has actual business address, owner name, phone number, the whole thing. IP points to the registrar's server (still using their "build a website" service). [email protected] gets drop. The integration with Google suite is costed on a per-user basis. I guess I'll consider paying for [email protected].

DMARC I did not know about. I guess that will be a question for Google support as they send the emails. There's no signature or links (we didn't have a website until yesterday, so definitely no point linking to it ;-p)

I've now spent 2 hours trying to figure out this issue and I am about to give up and go to bed. I've been having issues with Gmail rejecting emails from my VPS server because of false spam alerts (probably caused by lfd sending too many emails).

So I changed my Exim config to send emails from a different IP (my VPS comes with 3) and that fixed the issue. I also enabled DKIM and SPF on my domains for added measure. But now, all my emails appear as ("From: Sender Name via server.domain1.com") where server.domain1.com is my VPS hostname. I previously had the same issue in Outlook and turning off "Set SMTP Sender: headers" solved that problem. But I believe adding the DKIM and SPF now makes Gmail add "via server.domain1.com" to my messages. How do I fix this?

This is a typical header for a message (as it appears at gmail):

Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: by 10.60.44.163 with SMTP id f3csp248622oem;
        Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:23:18 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.50.106.200 with SMTP id gw8mr452788igb.10.1333081398523;
        Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:23:18 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: from domain2.com ([X.X.X.X])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id y1si810998igb.3.2012.03.29.21.23.18
        (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER);
        Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:23:18 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates X.X.X.X as permitted sender) client-ip=X.X.X.X;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates X.X.X.X as permitted sender) [email protected]; dkim=pass [email protected]
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; q=dns/txt; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=server.domain1.com; s=default;
    h=Date:Message-Id:From:Content-type:MIME-Version:Subject:To; bh=wF8bBRgh01EYg4t5DAeVPv1Ps906UVIeRnQCb/HvSYw=;
    b=k/Pg7lnrO+Ud/z1mOTv+O/3DiJzzQgyBhfIizIaFHM8tF/eNJt5P2k+9yQB224sxYstZIWwVRBJmiqvcM1QhARv1HWqWma0crppZ3JOn+LRHANan634OBi+58SIRA+gu;
Received:       (Exim 4.77)
       id 1SDTVE-0005HA-9Y   
    for [email protected]; Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:31:56 -0400
To: [email protected]
Subject: Password Reset Request
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
From: Sender Name <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:31:56 -0400
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - server.domain1.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - domain2.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [507 504] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - server.domain1.com

We have a client that has an email marketing list of about 50k contacts that have at some point opted in to their mailing list. They haven't used the list for a while and on their last campaign got a lot of spam complaints - drawing the wrath of their email campaign provider.

We've been tasked with coming up with a way to help them clean up their list. The plan is to mail each of their customers and ask them to click on a link to confirm their subscription. If they don't click on the link within seven days, we'll remove them from the list. Of course, we'll scrub through the list first to remove addresses that are bad without attempting to email the user (DNS checks, valid email address form, etc). We'll also track which emails bounce and remove them as well. This will be done on a temporary server from one of their lesser used domains.

My question is, how can we send out email to 50k recipients without getting the server blacklisted? The things I have in mind are making sure the domain has DNS setup properly, that the server can be resolved through reverse DNS, has a SPF record, Domain Keys, and valid abuse and postmaster addresses. What else can or should we do?

Recently one of our client machines was infected with a virus and I believe was spamming addresses in the user's contact list. Since then our server has been appearing on blacklists and it has been causing our e-mail to be blocked and returned by many clients. The virus has since been cleared, what can I do to get our server off these blacklists so that we will have more reliable e-mail service? Will I have to change my IP address?

Thanks,

Mike

I have this funny thing. When I send an email out, to yahoo, gmail or hotmail users. If I include a link, it will treat as spam mail. But if i removed the link, it will become "inbox", not spam mail. Weird huh??

Is there anything to do with my mail server?? How to prevent my email to be treat as spam mail? I need link in my email content :)

php code:

// Send Email to the user
$headers =  'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n";

// Email Variables

$toUser  = '[email protected]'; // recipient
$subject = "Subject HERE!!"; // subject
$body    = '<div style="font-family:Arial; color:#333;">
                Some content here ...
        <a href="www.google.com" target="_blank"> Link here</a> 
        </div>';

if(mail($toUser,$subject,$body,$headers)){
    echo "Email SENT" . '<br>';
} else {
    echo "Email cannot sent" . '<br>';
};