Anyone got any ideas why my mailserver has been blacklisted for no good reason?

[Stephen Philbin]

Could anyone help to shed some light on why my mail server is blacklisted please? It's barely sent out any mail at all so far and it's certainly never sent out any spam. Yet still it is blacklisted on some DNS blacklist. I'm aware of things like DKIM, SPF and Microsoft's SenderID and I'm pretty confident none of those are the issue.

I'm trying to send mail to my local health centre to order prescriptions (seeing as that's pretty much the only way they accept orders now), but the connection from my mail server is rejected. Here's the (rather brief) SMTP conversation.

www:~# telnet smtp.nhs.net 25
Trying 216.239.198.21...
Connected to smtp.nhs.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
554 Mail from 207.210.112.173 refused, see RBL server sbl-xbl.dnsbl
Connection closed by foreign host.

As you can see, I don't even get as far as the HELO/EHLO and I get dismissed. Anyone have any idea what the hell "RBL server sbl-xbl.dnsbl" is? I'm rather lost here.

[Centauri]

Seems to be something to do with this mob (http://www.spamhaus.org/).

[LeeU]

I've had problems with Spamhaus before. Not sure of your set-up but if you are using an IP that has had other people sending spam, Spamhaus will list the entire host as blacklisted as their domain is seen as the sender. Also, if you send e-mails with certain links or words, they do it also. They are not very well liked by many for those reasons.

[Stephen Philbin]

Yeah. I've just been having a read around and found some people expressing an interest in having the villages of the Spamhaus workers pillaged. What's really annoying me right now is the fact that the Spamhaus database says that I'm not listed for rejection, yet the nhs.net server is still rejecting my connections based on the Spamhaus database.

And there was I thinking that Netwoksolutions.com not giving a flying fudge about what their customers need coupled with DKIM, SPF and, Microsoft's attempt at hijacking SPF, SenderID were all I had to worry about.

I'll keep sniffing around and post back if I come up with anything new.

[Stephen Philbin]

Just a quick update.

As I said in my previous post, Spamhaus said I was not blacklisted, but I was still getting rejected. The Spamhaus website says the following If the IP you are checking is not in our database, but you are receiving bounce messages saying it is, then it is probable the IP has been removed from our database but DNS servers around the internet have not yet updated. In this case, wait 1-2 hours and the blocking should clear by itself.

However it was closer to 12 hours that I had to wait before the nhs mail system would accept me as a patient and not a spammer and but that's not where the fun ends. It turns out that whilst I was a patient again last night, I am once again a spammer today. Needless to say, I'm rather ****ed off with this ****.

More fun as and when it comes...