Earthlink email delivery

[mark]

First off -- we've constantly had problems with Earthlink blocking us since we launched over a year ago. I've had to request us be unblocked on average once a month and it's kind of frustrating -- they're the only provider that is doing this!

So, I'm sorry to anybody who's using Earthlink to receive email. We do our best to get unblocked as soon as we hear about it, but sometimes we don't find out about it until after you do -- and I know that's frustrating. Getting notifications in a timely fashion is really important on a site like Dreamwidth.

We're trying to work on a better long term resolution (getting on some sort of whitelist?) but it's going to take some time.

But! Maybe you can help:

Does anybody reading this have contacts within Earthlink's systems administration/mail group? If we could talk to someone directly, we could probably get this resolved permanently in a few hours. It's finding someone to talk to that's the hard part!

Thanks in advance!

Comments

[alierak]

Inconclusive. They might accept a deliverability question. Example threads also include, paraphrased from February archives, "Hey, is peer 1 a spammer network? Yes and no. Here's a list of all their IP space if you want to block them, but you'll probably break something if you do." I'm guessing we had Earthlink deliverability issues even back with Slicehost, so you'd want to ask the question from the Earthlink perspective instead, like you're doing.

[mark]

I think the main problem is the email forwarding we provide for people, which ends up forwarding spam in some cases and that triggers Earthlink to block us as they think we're either spammers or an open relay.

I've been pondering maybe doing all of our mail forwarding from one set of IPs and having the mail that comes "from Dreamwidth" happen from an entirely different set. That way at least our mail will still get through.

This assumes forwarding is the problem, too, and it may not be. It could be when someone comments with spam, and we email out that comment (containing spam) ...

Email is so annoying, heh.

[jalendavi_lady]

Also the received vs read mail ratio.

I've noticed Yahoo Mail starts labeling some website email alert lists I'm signed up for start diverting to Spam unless I look at some of them every once in a while.

If people are asking for email alerts and then not opening the emails because they've read the news post or seen the comment to their entry or are using the E-mail My Comments option as a way to archive things they've said online, it can mess with that ratio, fast.

[pauamma]

*recovers from flashback to LJ support, late 2006* Hmm, IIRC, 6A/LJ ops tried that (the split SMTP thing), and it only worked for a while.

[alierak]

Yeah. Maybe also send official communications from an email address in a subdomain.