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US Based VPS or SMTP Service on Non-Blacklisted IP Space
ChrisCantwell
Member
I have for years maintained a newsletter for my blog and podcast without any major spam complaint problems, because I do not spam.
In recent weeks however, all my emails to Microsoft users have been bounced on account of my web host residing on a very large network segment which has ended up on a dubious blocklist that apparently accepts payment for delisting.
Seems to me I'd be better off paying for a separate SMTP server than submitting to extortion, but my browsing of the offers section has not yielded suitable results. I find many of the budget hosts are similarly blacklisted, and that the SMTP offers I find have hourly send limitations that are prohibitive of my requirements.
I'll note that while I can promise spam complaints will not be a problem, there is a possibility that people who are not my organic subscribers may make content complaints for political reasons. If you have a "hate speech" clause in your acceptable use policy, we won't be a good fit, even though I would personally dispute this categorization of my content.
If you can justify an offer over $10/month, I am capable of paying this, but my only requirement is clean IP space that allows responsible SMTP. I don't need lots of RAM or disk or bandwidth or CPU for this purpose and I'll be discinclined to pay for it. But, if I can make other use of the server in addition to the SMTP function, then perhaps I can pay more and make greater use of the service.
I say US based in the subject line because, being US based myself, along with most of my clients, this seems the most sensible thing, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
Thank you for your consideration.
Comments
Amazon SES
mail.baby from @interservermike but their signups may be closed (?) not sure.
Let me guess, UCEPROTECT blocked the whole ASN or a /24, Hotmail drops all emails since they support UCEPROTECT. Could ask your host to put you on another location on a different subnet.
Bingo UCEPROTECTL3
UCEPROTECTL3 does not affect deliverability in anyway.
I have even found my AWS ips on UCEPROTECTL2 at times.
If you are being partially blocked by Microsoft's network via ASN or IP range, you just need to talk to them to get it sorted.
Microsoft maintains multiple blacklists, so, you gotta fill the right form.
Been there, done that.
No they don’t. Microsoft does not use UCEPROTECT.
This isn’t the problem, you’ve misdiagnosed it. Half of the internet is on UCEPROTECT L3, and it’s not intended to be treated as a normal blacklist. People will tell you that I’m wrong on this left and right, it’s such widely spread misinformation that many people refuse to even question it.
I wrote something about this not long ago: https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/4451/microsoft-does-not-use-uceprotect-and-other-misconceptions
Here's where you request that they delist your IP: https://olcsupport.office.com/
They will tell you they can't and don't need to. You'll reply and tell them you need mitigation. They may go back and forth with you several times declining your request and telling you that they can't. This is part of their training.
Thanks, I just submitted a request.
Thanks to others for your helpful responses as well.
I made the UCEPROTECT conclusion based on a report from MXToolbox, since they showed no other problems I assumed that had to be it.
Hopefully this olcsupport request straightens it out.
Do you know if it is the expected behavior of that page to refresh after submitting without giving any indication of a successful submission? I have now submitted this form from two different web browsers. Yandex is my default, but when I got this peculiar seeming non response I tried Chrome with identical outcome.
I believe that is its behavior. The whole process is mildly hostile to weed out people.
Just to put a warning here for you and anyone else who reads this:
There was a time when mxtoolbox added a fake RBL that returned every lookup as true, which caused every IP checked to be shown as blacklisted. Mxtoolbox doesn't seem to be interested in what blacklists matter or are actually used for anything, their sole purpose seems to be bias confirmation that something is broken with your hosting provider.
Truth be told there isn't necessarily a better option to do what they claim to do, so maybe it's just incompetence rather than maliciousness, they may just simply be a relic of a simpler time when people just didn't know as much and didn't ask as many questions.
That time that they added the fake RBL, I had to tweet at them from a twitter account with a very high follower count (@digitalocean) to reduce the incredible ticket load of people flooding in with "My IP is blacklisted, you need to fix this" all because of absolutely nothing that impacted absolutely no one other than a little red mark on a tool that claimed nothing more than to independently diagnose "what was wrong" with no real logic to it. It was honestly infuriating, and I've never been more skeptical of them and their motives than since that day.
We can offer you a vps for your needs like this but will you deal with the spam issues?
If I had spam issues I'd know better than to come here asking for a place to spam, and of course, one with spam issues would be a whole lot less concerned with the TOS of his potential hosts than I.
My whole point is that I was on a subnet that was blocked despite my best practices to avoid spam issues.
I run a double opt in mailing list with one click unsubscribe links in every message. I've done so for many years, and I can provide to any interested host detailed statistics on my rates of unsubscriptions, subscribe dates, subscription IP addresses, and opens etc since that is all tracked through my software.
On the exceedingly rare occasion that some former reader, or some saboteur who signed up for the singular purpose of causing me a problem, which occurs far more frequently than anyone receiving an unsolicited email from me, opts to complain rather than click that link, I click it for him when I get the complaint.
I am a professional entertainer, operating in the political markets, and while I do monetize my content with sales of products and services, my entire project is dependent on reaching people who want to be reached, and avoiding, to the extent possible, people who are not in line with my goals. I have blocked many times more people than have blocked me, on social media, to demonstrate my model of communication. I'd be a fool to operate otherwise when it came to SMTP, and I am no fool.
The name you see me posting from is the name on my government ID. It is the name on my website, and it is the name you will read in the newspapers from time to time if you keep up with Right of center US politics.
It is not a name you will see associated with spam, and not my worst enemy would say otherwise if he hoped to preserve his reputation.
terrorists.
I think you probably just misunderstand them like most people do. You know how it goes, and I'll speak your language with it: One person calls you a racist. Then a news article says you're "accused of being a racist." Then the next article says "suspected racist." Then the next article says "known racist." No one actually stops to ask you anything or confirm anything, they just feed off each other and escalate until "@treesmokah is a known white supremacist" becomes the leading headline.
That's kind of how UCEPROTECT works. People share half informed opinions of them which get repeated as facts so many times that suddenly they're as good as facts merely because they have been repeated in so many places, by so many people.
But the largest misconception is that they work in extortion. If you actually pay attention though, the ONLY reason you would EVER want to pay them for an IP delisting is because you are about to be delisted in a few hours and you are requesting that they speed up the process.
Deeper explanation:
Paid removal isn't whitelisting. If you pay for a delisting and you send spam after, you could be relisted the same day. If you already stopped the flow of spam, your listing is on it's way to automatic removal. But they happen to offer you the opportunity to interrupt the automation and remove it early for a fee. But that's all it is, early removal. No promises or guarantees of anything else.
And never forget: A blacklist is only as powerful as the email companies that subscribe to it. Most email companies subscribe to a number of blacklists between 0 and 2, meaning most of them are functionally worthless in most places.
True however, not entirely practical case.
If your provider's range (UCEPROTECT2 and UCEPROTECT3) is on their list, you have no way to ask for a single IP de-listing, unless you pay them for de-listing.
When you pay them, they allow de-listing of even single IP even though whole range is blacklisted.
You are right after that though, if that IP goes into Spam mode, it might again end up there.
Admittedly I've never tried to deal with an IP on the L2 list that was in the middle of a spammy range. But L3 at least we know is useless so any attempt at removal there is cosmetic anyway. L1 and L3 are really all most people talk about, L2 is a bit more complex.
Our OVH range are in UCEPROTECT 2 + 3 since before we had the service and we use MailChannels.
Show the exact bounce message?
...matter!
BuyVM, I can attest, are GREAT PEOPLE. @Francisco came to my rescue years ago, and everything I had with them was flawless for the duration. My systems were consolidated elsewhere during my absence for a period, but I actually have a ticket open with them right now waiting to hear back on whether I have to worry about blacklisted IP space for SMTP. (My service with them prior didn't use SMTP)
show exact bounce text? maybe you go wrong direction
Impressive Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Cantwell
Maybe check out: "Null's Tier List for Internet Services"
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/nulls-tier-list-for-internet-services.129513/
Archive From April 26th 2023: https://archive.is/xdkXw
Yeah, Wikipedia has become an Antifa blog. Congrats on learning to use Google....
If anybody else finds themselves in this position, I found another resource.
I hadn't heard back from filling out the form at https://olcsupport.office.com/
So I found this site https://sender.office.com/
This sent me a confirmation email right away, and when I requested to delist, my request was denied, and I was given an option to escalate to Microsoft Support, which I have done, and I await further response.
if you see escalate, then it is probably subnet indeed. sometimes it is even /32
escalate helps rarely, but helps
You have to keep pushing. Never accept their rejection. It's not being pushy, they expect you to push back.
Sometimes they do not reply, sometimes reply after 5 days and tell everything is ok with IP. Need to see what OP will receive.
When I see escalate, I change IP. Sometimes it is /32 or the previous IP owner did something bad.
Do you know if it is the expected behavior of that page to refresh after submitting without giving any indication of a successful submission? I have now submitted this form from two different web browsers. Yandex is my default, but when I got this peculiar seeming non response I tried Chrome with identical outcome.
For the benefit of those who come later, it appears that some sort of error was occurring when I got no confirmation submitting the form. After not getting an answer for more than 24 hours, I tried this form again, and this time, in my Yandex Browser, I got a confirmation message on the page, and then I got an automated email not long after.
As @jar predicted, they initially blew me off with what appears an automated response a few hours later, stating the IP address (addresses, actually, because I spun up another server elsewhere that is having the same problem) was not eligible for mitigation.
I explained that I was going to have to refuse service to Microsoft users if they wouldn't allow me to communicate with my customers via email, and I am now in a dialogue with real human beings at least.
One of their managers actually told me point blank that this is all intentional process, which I greatly appreciated