Alex Reisner's questions

I have a web site that needs to send email to customers to deliver files that they have purchased. Reliable email delivery is vital to this business. Unfortunately, most of the emails sent by my server are not delivered due to my MTA's "poor reputation." Here are some sample lines from my mail.log:

Feb 20 02:40:41 servername postfix/smtp[14580]: 4E30B1100C7: host aspmx.l.google.com[209.85.211.78] said: 421-4.7.0 [174.143.183.26] Our system has detected an unusual amount of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 blocked. Please visit http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html 421 4.7.0 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. 10si1216690ywh.92 (in reply to end of DATA command)

Feb 20 12:49:22 servername postfix/smtp[5651]: A86CB1CC0CF: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mx3.comcast.net[76.96.58.14]:25, delay=55186, delays=55185/0.01/0.93/0, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (host mx3.comcast.net[76.96.58.14] refused to talk to me: 554 imta36.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net comcast 174.143.206.168 found on one or more DNSBLs, see http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/BL000001)

Feb 16 10:50:11 servername postfix/smtp[6931]: 98B94380A1: host mx-in-2.webreus.nl[212.61.252.240] refused to talk to me: 554-mx-in-2.webreus.nl 554-Your access to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTA's poor reputation. If you believe that this failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means. 554 More information can be found on http://senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailhost?search_string=174.143.206.168

Feb 16 10:50:12 servername postfix/smtp[6931]: 98B94380A1: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mx-in-1.webreus.nl[212.61.10.240]:25, delay=173653, delays=173650/0.22/2.8/0, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (host mx-in-1.webreus.nl[212.61.10.240] refused to talk to me: 554-mx-in-1.webreus.nl 554-Your access to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTA's poor reputation. If you believe that this failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means. 554 More information can be found on http://senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailhost?search_string=174.143.206.168)

Steps I've taken to try to improve the situation:

• set up reverse DNS lookups to work correctly
• set up SPF records for my domain
• disallow incoming connections to my SMTP server
• format messages according to RFC 2822
• never send unsolicited messages (I never have)

My server is in Rackspace's cloud. Is it possible that the IP address's bad reputation was inherited from a previous customer? Some of the above steps have been taken in the past week--am I going to have to wait for the situation to improve? Are there other things I should be doing? Should I hire a third party to send emails for me?

I have a custom daemon that is managed by upstart on my Ubuntu server. It works perfectly except that I need to capture (log) the daemon's output. The official stanzas page says that I can use console logged to do this, but what file does it log to?

I've also read that console logged is no longer a valid stanza. I'm currently using 0.3.9 (Hardy) but will upgrade to 0.6.x (Lucid) in a few months. If console logged in fact won't work with later versions, what do I use instead?

I have a web site which needs to send email to confirm orders and alert subscribed users of certain events. I do not need to send email through the server for any other reason, so I would like to prevent anyone outside of localhost from even connecting to port 25 for SMTP. I've tried to do this like so:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 0.0.0.0 --dport 25 -j DROP

but I can still telnet to port 25 and type SMTP commands from another computer. What am I doing wrong? Also, is there a better way to achieve what I want? To clarify: what I want is a machine that can send emails (via SMTP), but only ones that originate from scripts running on the machine. And any configuration must "live" through re-boots.

I'm using Postfix on Ubuntu (Hardy).