SORBS Problem

[irasmith]

I am really baffled because the last few weeks I have been unable to send emails to a family members email address. The emails bounce back to me with the message "Your server IP address is in the SORBS DNSBL database, bye".

 

I am using the same email account as always, one of my domain name email accounts. I have gone to the SORBS site and verified that my domain name is not listed in the database but the emails still will not go through. I have gone so far as to create an account on the SORBS site and login, hoping to find some sort of way to get a support ticket to them but after searching all over I can find no way to contact them. There is some wording which would lead one to think if you clicked on the word 'here' or some other key words that you would be taken to a different web page for help but none of the words that lead you to think they are links are actual links but just words and I can't click on any of them.

 

Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?

[PlausiblyDamp]

Rather than the domain name you need to check iftheactual IP address of your mail server is listed.

[irasmith]

Rather than the domain name you need to check iftheactual IP address of your mail server is listed.

 

Thanks for the reply, yep I did check the ip address as well or at least to the best of my ability based on what was reported back in the email that bounced back to me and that also came back with a notation that it was not listed in their database.

 

Perhaps it may have something to do with how the email was sent. Even though I have my own domain name which has email and all associated with it on a shared hosted server, I tend to do most of my emails locally on my desktop using Outlook and have Outlook configured to make use of the server to send/receive email. So perhaps somhow that is tripping it up.

 

What is odd is that I used another email account of mine not associated with the domain name, my primary email account associated with my Internet provider for my home DSL account and the like. The initial email from that account to my relative bounced back with the same kind of error message. I checked the domain name and IP address in the bounced email and those also checked out as not being listed in the database. So I waited about an hour or so after the initial attempt and resent the message from my non-domain associated email account and this time it went through.

 

I have never had this sort of issue before, and of course I have no way of knowing if any other person(s) whom I email are on service providers that make use of the SORBS database. I only know of this one relative that has a provider that makes use of it and know of it because of my emails getting rejected at times.

 

Perhaps its just me but I think the idea of classifying and rejecting email based on IP address is a bad idea. Seems it penalizes those of us who do not have our own private servers when someone on the shared server does the junk email thing to cause the whole server to be classified as rejectable.

[PlausiblyDamp]

The problem lies with mis-configured mail servers, if a server is configured as an open relay then anyone can use it to send e-mail. This also means the source of the e-mail is difficult to trace.

Such open relays are often used by spammers etc. as it obscures the true source of any e-mail you received.

Banning by IP address of such badly configured servers is the only realistic way to handle them as SMTP allows anyone to fake a return e-mail.

[irasmith]

Thanks to both your post, and some further digging around on my own, I am starting to get to the bottom of things. I ended up ignoring the IP addresses returned in the message notifiying me the email did not go through. I instead logged into my shared hosting account and looked up its IP address. I then verified that IP in the SORB database and saw its listing there.

 

Since my domain is on a shared server, I opened up a support ticket with my hosting provider to inform them of the issue so they could work on resolving it.