IT Legends - Tech in Connecticut

A few weeks ago, one of my clients reported he had a bounced email to his client. It looked to me like it was a standard server-based spam misidentification; these things happen. So I followed the instructions I was led to in order to remove my clients’ email server from AT&T’s blacklist, which involved checking to make sure the server wasn’t on a few public DNSBL servers. His server was not, so I submitted it on an AT&T website and asked to remove it. I didn’t start to make a connection between AT&T and One Communications until a second and third client reported the same issue. Finally, my fourth and last One Communications customer client notified me of the same problem. So, since none of the servers were ever published on any of these well-known public DNSBL servers, I can only assume AT&T decided to blacklist all email coming from at least a large part of the One Communications IP range here in Connecticut, if not the entire set of blocks. My One Communications customers span a couple circuit types from from DSL to T1, none of them in the same /24 block.

Someone screwed up big over at AT&T, or did they achieve exactly what they wanted? I feel sorry for One Communications customers that don’t have decent IT support for their email servers. I feel even more sorry for trusting AT&T customers (that’d be att.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net and others) that are depending on AT&T to deliver their email to them. The intended recipient never even received any notifications that there might have been a mail they might have wanted to read - it was just rejected outright. I don’t approve of automated methods that do not allow a user to review the choices that were made. I guess that’s the trade-off when going with such a large clearing house for email. Wait a second… Google does it well enough with GMail and Google Apps, why can’t AT&T? By the way, itlegends.net uses Google Apps to host email - I’d at least get the mail delivered to my Spam folder where I could review it if I chose to.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Adventures in IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.