<story><title>A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server</title><url>http://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/719/a-survival-guide-for-the-small-mail-server</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I think it is absolutely hilarious (and infuriating) that in their opening paragraph they forgot to list spam blacklists, like themselves, as being perhaps the biggest hurdle for small companies and individuals running mail servers.&lt;p&gt;I ran a mail server for almost five years, and 9&amp;#x2F;10 of the issues I had to resolve were various anti-spam blacklists or individual hosts blocking our emails and then having customers complaining because we never emailed them.&lt;p&gt;There was never any reason given for the blocks, and our logs didn&amp;#x27;t show any outgoing spam. However all of these spam blacklists would accept a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot; if you didn&amp;#x27;t want to wait the 24-72 hours for them to unblock you. Essentially it is a shakedown.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve just given up self-hosting and I recommend others do the same. The issue isn&amp;#x27;t the spam, it is how much time you&amp;#x27;ll waste fighting the anti-spam blacklists and large email hosts. A job better left to e.g. SendGrid or SES.&lt;p&gt;PS - We sent tens of thousands of emails a day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eps</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;We sent tens of thousands of emails a day.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The subject is self-hosting a &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;_small_&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; email server. When you get into 10K&amp;#x2F;day range, you are bound to have false positive spam reports - both automatic and from pissed users - and this in turn can lead to RBL listings.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been running a mail server since 2004 and not once had I have any issues with RBLs. It&amp;#x27;s a low-volume server though, perhaps several thousand emails per month.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server</title><url>http://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/719/a-survival-guide-for-the-small-mail-server</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I think it is absolutely hilarious (and infuriating) that in their opening paragraph they forgot to list spam blacklists, like themselves, as being perhaps the biggest hurdle for small companies and individuals running mail servers.&lt;p&gt;I ran a mail server for almost five years, and 9&amp;#x2F;10 of the issues I had to resolve were various anti-spam blacklists or individual hosts blocking our emails and then having customers complaining because we never emailed them.&lt;p&gt;There was never any reason given for the blocks, and our logs didn&amp;#x27;t show any outgoing spam. However all of these spam blacklists would accept a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot; if you didn&amp;#x27;t want to wait the 24-72 hours for them to unblock you. Essentially it is a shakedown.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve just given up self-hosting and I recommend others do the same. The issue isn&amp;#x27;t the spam, it is how much time you&amp;#x27;ll waste fighting the anti-spam blacklists and large email hosts. A job better left to e.g. SendGrid or SES.&lt;p&gt;PS - We sent tens of thousands of emails a day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vacri</author><text>I have this problem at one company at the moment. We use gmail with spf and dkim, and have a low mail count and no mass marketing that I&amp;#x27;m aware of. We&amp;#x27;re on two blacklists. One gives zero reason for being on it, and has a &amp;#x27;contact us for reevaluation&amp;#x27; form which I&amp;#x27;ve submitted. No feedback, no change, no idea what to do next.&lt;p&gt;The other blacklist suggests that it&amp;#x27;s our commercial site that&amp;#x27;s hosted with a provider who uses linode, and the linode CIDR block our company website is on has been &amp;#x27;banned with no recourse to remove&amp;#x27; due to the huge amounts of spam it has sent. For that list, it apparently doesn&amp;#x27;t matter that our mail comes from google, not linode. When I get some free time, I&amp;#x27;ll try to move that website.&lt;p&gt;What do you do when the vigilantes screw you?</text></comment>