DreamHost Customer Support Team
December 21, 2016 at 11:02 PM
To: Steve Chamberlin
Re: My Dreamhost server is on a spam blacklist - can't send email


Hello,

We are currently in a dialog with 1&1 regarding this issue. There seems
to be some confusion as to the reason they have given us for their recent
rejection of customer email to their servers, so we are requesting a more
thorough review of their rejection criteria. I do apologize for any
confusion regarding this matter, but the obtuse nature of 1&1's logic is
to blame here.
We run all of our mail servers behind a load balanced proxy to minimize
abuse and improve reliability.

1&1 specifically cites an issue with the manner in which our mail servers
identify themselves when communicating with their mail servers, as
several mail servers outbound with the same IP address.
1&1, rather than accept that the mailserver may have a different hostname
(although communicating via the load balancer which is also on the same
domain), will reject mail from these load balancers as a reverse lookup
responds with the name of the load balancer, and not the individual mail
server (as it's behind the proxy).

Their suggested fix would be to have us rename all of our mailservers to
a single, generic name, and differentiate mail servers using a
descriptive reply on HELO/EHLO request. This would require major
re-engineering on our part, and is most likely _not_ going to happen. 

Our suggested fix was to simply perform a lookup on the domain name, As
opposed to the FQDN of the mail server, which should resolve back to our
address space (way simpler, and just as difficult to spoof).

Again I do apologize if you believe this is due to a lack of support on
our part, but the issue here is not spam related at all, but just the
european side of 1&1 not understanding that unlike large scale service
providers, we would rather not run multiple mail servers on independent
IP spaces (when we can offer these IP's to our customers, for security
certificates, for instance).

With regards to potential blacklist reports on some load balancers, some
blacklist providers (Mostly European providers such as UCEProtect,
Backscatter, and LashBack), provide a paid "express" delisting, while
imposing an unreasonable long wait for manual or automated delisting (In
the case of LashBack, they autodelist after a month). As this amounts to
extortion, it is Dreamhost policy not to utilize paid delisting services
(they provide no added benefit to customers, encourage "bad behavior",
and are generally a sign of an overzealous mail system administrator).

The best advice we can provide in this situation would be to contact the
recipient, and request that they contact their mail system administrator
in order to request that they whitelist your domain.

If you have any further questions, please respond to this email.

Sincerely,

Erik N.