Anyone else having spam issues because of bad IP address history?
TL/DR: My email gets marked as spam despite the domains and server settings being clean. It's all because the Linode customer before me was a spammer and Linodel gave me their old IP address. Anyone else facing this?
I was assigned two different IP addresses following a migration to a new Linode. The first one had a deep, insurmountable spam issue, so support assigned me a second one. That one, too, has a well-documented spam issue. Cloudmark, AT&T and Google all flagged it in November - three months before Linode assigned it to me.
After months of work and little actual help from support, I've been able to resolve the issues with Cloudmark and Google is only a problem for some domains. AT&T still won't deliver any of the domains email. None of it is related to mail server settings (DKIM, SPF and PTR records are all in order). All of the issues are because of the IP history of the Linode.
Support's last message to me was basically "what do you want us to do about it?" so opening yet another ticket seems pointless, despite this being a clear issue of Linode's sloppy housekeeping.
Anyone else having similar issues?
5 Replies
@wcsprime --
It sounds like you have a bad case of this:
https://www.linode.com/community/questions/20952/linode-blacklisted-on-uceprotect-rbl
Every net in Linode's ASN appears on this RBL. UCEPROTECT is an extortion racket.
-- sw
@stevewi That may be the case, but if Google, Cloudmark and AT&T are all listening to them, then there's a real problem.
@acanton77 Yes, I run my own mail server and it passes every configuration test you can throw at it.
+1 for me, although I am not having any issues with Google, thankfully. I have had my Linode IP for over 10 years, never once being involved in any kind of abusive behavior.
This is a problem with Cloudmark Sender Intelligence (CSI), which is being used by several prominent email providers.
Cloudmark is basically a vigilante operation that will not delist your IP no matter how many times you submit it, no matter what your reputation is elsewhere, and regardless of whether you have implemented SPF, DMARC, and DKIM. I can no longer send to comcast.net, my HOA, as well as multiple other services. If an email provider uses CSI, email from a server on Linode will be blocked, no matter what you do, and Cloudmark does not care. What they do is nothing short of extortion and incompetence.
What would REALLY help is if a large organization, such as Akamai (hint-hint) could place some kind of pressure on Cloudmark to get them to stop their abusive behavior (and it is, indeed, abusive).