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Uh-oh I fucked up.

Not at work, but with my website where I had an email forwarder to an external address. The forwarding was everything so that I could do the spam filtering and occasional check in one place. Unfortunately, that triggered the spam detection at the external address (after some years!), and my provider ended up on a blacklist.

That got me a pretty angry mail from my hosting provider who had already disabled the forwarding and wanted to make sure that I understood the issue and would not put it in again.

I thought about whether they had fucked up because it was even possible to do that, or whether I had fucked up because I should have known. Hm yeah I opted for the latter and apologised.

The support guy seemed happy that I didn't try to argue (possibly like other customers...), and advised that I just should add another account in my email client. Sure, at least that will prevent this shit from happening again.

He also mentioned that every single blacklist issue they had experienced in this year was accidental due to external forwarding issues and that they would consider just disabling it altogether.

Which is probably a smart move, just as hint for these ranters here who work at hosting companies. Or at least only enable external forwarding if spam assassin or so is in place.

Comments
  • 1
    Haha! Good move 😁
  • 2
    Glad to hear that you were supportive towards the support guy. However, I'd highly recommend iRedMail if your hosting provider allows for it! Aruba Cloud for example (which I'm hosting my public-facing servers at) puts all responsibility in my ballpark. No responsibility on their end, allowing everything, leaving me to not be a dick. I quite like that. It's excellent for public facing services and control over them.
    I'd advise against Aruba Cloud if you need instant good reputation on your mail servers IP-wise though. The reputation on the IP range is terrible, and took me about half a year to polish for my servers. It's not worth it if you in any way need deliverability during that period. Other than that however, excellent provider. Extremely cheap, and one of my servers is clocking in on its 4th month continuous uptime there now.

    I haven't checked them yet, but Scaleway seems to provide a very competitive alternative to my €.1.21/m servers at Aruba Cloud right now. They also allow unmetered internet, which is really interesting for Tor exit nodes (which I'm considering). For the foreseeable future, that's the provider I'm ogling at for future light-duty servers as Aruba Cloud closed their €1.21/m offers (the respective datacenter had all its slots taken).
  • 0
    "can I count on you to help me resolve this issue to today?"

    "you sure?"

    "would you reconsider?"

    And after each question you wait in dead silence.

    I learned this the hard way from working in a call center for a while before realizing it was about gyping the elderly out of their medication money.

    Apparently I was really good at it.
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