Every once in a while, though, relying on things in the cloud has its drawbacks.
$ host 97.234.14.204.bl.spamcannibal.org
97.234.14.204.bl.spamcannibal.org has address 127.0.0.2
That's showing that one of salesforce.com's outbound mail servers is on a spam blacklist at the moment.
Since one of the things that salesforce.com does it coordinate email, it ends up sending a lot of email on behalf of its customers. It can be hard to keep up with all that, and a poorly-worded sales attempt can look an awful lot like spam. (You can find the example at spamcannibal's website; we've avoided linking because it is possibly an innocent mistake on the part of another vendor.)
If you rely on a third-party to send email for you, what happens if that third-party ends up on a blacklist because of another of its customers? These are the questions we'll have to face in the coming years.
4 comments:
SpamCannibal is well known to include legitimate IP's in their blacklist, they have previously include Yahoo.com, hotmail.com etc.
Most ISP's are moving to reputation based systems and away from relying purely on blacklists. The Blacklist helped a lot in the early days of spamming by blocking the specific IP's. Today the spammers are more sophisticated and have better tools to get around that, which is driving large ISP's to reputation based models and focusing on inspecting the content.
Salesforce have functionality which allows their customers to route all emails through their own email servers, and not rely on Salesforce to deliver their emails. In addition they have improved the way they deliver emails in their past release, to be more compliant with the RFC's around sending on behalf of users.
It's a whole new world for sure. This issue used to only effect POP mail users. But with the move to hosted Exchange it will subject a lot more people to this problem. I've long been opposed to the user of blacklists. It seems to just make the problem worse instead of better. Once a mail server is blacklisted the problem user isn't the only one punished. The blacklist effects perhaps thousands of innocent users as you found out.
You make is sound so simple.... innocent mail sender penalized by nasty blacklist. In reality, these services are primarily interested in selling bandwidth. The have little incentive to filter outbound mail or police the practices of those to whom they sell email services. The "so called" opt in practices of many senders are responsible for most of the instances. Providers reluctant to terminate an account are really the problem, not the blacklists.
As a follow up, I suggest you look at the spam sample from salesforce.com and you will see SPAM sent to a role account, hardly a user that would OPT IN.
Lookup 204.14.234.70and the numerous subsequent attempts to connect over the following few months.
204.14.234.69 Fri Mar 13 02:52:36 2009
204.14.234.70 Sat Aug 2 17:20:46 2008
204.14.234.71 Wed Dec 10 12:11:36 2008
204.14.234.72 Wed Oct 15 21:02:48 2008
204.14.234.73 Sat Aug 2 16:28:11 2008
204.14.234.74 Tue Aug 12 20:19:03 2008
204.14.234.75 Sun Mar 22 00:59:40 2009
204.14.234.76 Tue Mar 10 23:11:03 2009
204.14.234.77 Mon Oct 27 02:58:35 2008
A genuine spam source if I ever saw one.
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