Topic: Suggestion to resolve blocked domain sending

[PeteAUK]

Hi All,

A bit like busses, it seems that when I get one problem I get multiple ones!  This time I'm after suggestions.  We've been having problems recently sending e-mails to a handful of customers.  After a bit of investigation all of these customers are running their website/e-mail through Heart Internet.  After more (and lengthy) discussions it would appear that Heart Internet have blocked our domain entirely.  I believe this may have initially occurred due to a spoof attack using one of our addresses at the beginning of the year.

Heart aren't prepared to budge on removing the block so we have a number of customers (most likely more than we're aware of) who will never receive e-mails from us.  They have also confirmed that they don't have SPF checking in place and are not planning on implementing it.

I'm at a bit of a loss what to do next.  I could implement a brand new domain name, I'm personally not keen on that solution.  So does anybody know of anything under the bonnet that could help?  I don't know if there is a way of determining if the recipient is on Heart and modifying the sending domain?

Help!

[Stefano]

I hope they're not blocking your domain but your IP

are you using a smarthost or sending directly from your server?

[PeteAUK]

Apparently it's the domain that's blocked - I guess I could test this though

The bulk of our mail is being sent directly from the server.

[Stefano]

well, you'd ask to Heart how/what are they blocking

[PeteAUK]

They've said it's the domain

[Stefano]

well, if so, I suggest you to ask your customers to complain at Heart internet

[janet]

PeteAUK

The bulk of our mail is being sent directly from the server.

So send via your ISP's smtp server, that way the credentials of your ISP are presented to the receiving server & in theory the ISP should have a good reputation & not be blocked.
Change the Smarthost setting in server manager Email panel to be the mail server of your ISP eg something like smtp.yourISP.com

[PeteAUK]

well, if so, I suggest you to ask your customers to complain at Heart internet

The MD ended up doing that and taking it farther than the main customer support.  Thankfully it's been unblocked now so just a matter of hoping it stays that way.  It is ludicrous that they don't support spf in some format though.

PeteAUK

So send via your ISP's smtp server, that way the credentials of your ISP are presented to the receiving server & in theory the ISP should have a good reputation & not be blocked.
Change the Smarthost setting in server manager Email panel to be the mail server of your ISP eg something like smtp.yourISP.com

It was blocked based on domain rather than IP, we send out e-mails using a variety of methods - a few people send using Googlemail and all of our newsletters are sent using Amazon SES in addition to sending directly, and all of them were blocked.