Yahoo and their mail filters..

[ops.lists at gmail.com (Suresh Ramasubramanian)]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Niall Donegan <niall at blacknight.com> wrote:
>
> Another interesting side effect of that is email forwarder accounts.
> Take a user who gets a domain on our shared hosting setup and forwards
> the email for certain users to a Yahoo account. If those mails are
> marked as spam, it seems to be our server that gets blacklisted rather
> than the originating server.
>

No surprise. Guess whose IP is the one handing off to yahoo?

If you have forwarding users -

* Spam filter them to reject spam rather than simply tag and forward it.
* Isolate your forwarding traffic through a single IP,  Let ISPs know.

> Feedback loops often aren't that useful either. We're on the AOL Scomp
> feedback loop, and we've often got fairly personal email sent to our
> abuse desk because the users simply press spam rather than delete.

You have a far smaller userbase, and a userbase you know. For us, with
random nigerians and other spammers signing up / trying to sign up all
the time, FBLs are invaluable as a realtime notification of spam
issues.

And as I said random misdirected spam reports wont trigger a block as
much as your leaking forwarded spam.  Or your getting a hacked cgi/php
or a spammer installed direct to mx spamware.  [so if you are cpanel -
smtp tweak/csf firewall and mod_security for apache should be default
on your install if you havent already done so]

-srs