[TriLUG] recent "Poor Reputation Sender" bounces

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2019, ac via TriLUG wrote:

Hi Andre,

Thanks for continuing to pop up and attempt to straighten things out.

> afaik nobody from Pilot is sending spam right now...

How do you know this? I can't even tell how many people are using pilot to send 
e-mail. I used to be able to look in /var/mail to see how many accounts there 
were, but that directory is empty now.

I assume to know if anyone is sending spam, you'd have to look in the actual 
e-mails people are sending. You might get an idea from the number of e-mails for 
each account.

> This has to do with an old report and I believe that the block is still 
> related to the SenderScore http://www.senderscore.org/

I'm dealing with senderscore then, at my second level of recursion, after being 
sent there from earthlink's reply.

I had to sign up for an account to get senderscore's report. It was an 
instrusive account setup, wanting to know my business and how much e-mail 
marketing my organisation does. I get the idea that they're an e-mail address 
harvesting outfit and their report is just a tease. I don't see that they're a 
useful part of the e-mail sending ecosystem.

The report is 2 screens

screen 1:

https://trilug.org/~jmack/senderscore/senderscore.3356.jpg

Only the graph is useful to me. It seems to be plotting one point per day over 
the last month

The blue line is volume. It seems we had a lull for the first two weeks, and 
then we reached 2400 e-mail/day in the last two weeks. I had forgotten that 
pilot not only sends e-mail for the people with shell accounts, but sends the 
TriLUG mailing list e-mails. I don't know how many people are on the TriLUG 
mailing list - let's say 200. This means 12 postings a day - not a particularly 
large volume. I can't imagine 2400 e-mails/day is much above the noise level for 
most e-mail servers.

The yellow line is the score. We had 100 when we weren't sending many e-mails, 
dropping to 0 as we ramped up the number of e-mails. I assume then that 100 is 
good and 0 is bad.

screen 2:

https://trilug.org/~jmack/senderscore/senderscore.3355.jpg

The only problem seems to be "Sender Rejected". I assume there are e-mail 
addresses on the mailing list that don't accept the mailing list e-mails.

Some time in the past, when I was receiving mailing list e-mail on a flakey 
machine, I'd occassionally get messages saying that my account had been 
deactivated for "too many bounces". Apparently the flakey machine I was on was 
(temporarily) not accepting e-mail from that mailing list. Does TriLUG eject 
accounts from the mailing list, that don't accept the mailing list e-mails?

How does senderscore know all this about us? Does our mail relay send the info 
to senderscore?

> listing as well, yes you can apply to have it removed, it is old and stale, so 
> hopefully they will agree to either increase the score or to remove/reset the 
> false reputation score...

According to the bounce message from earthlink, senderscore was failing us and I
had to get senderscore happy with us before going back to earthlink. However
there was no way I could see to ask for a score reset.

I assume we have to fix the sender rejects and can only do that by purging the
bad e-mail addresses from the mailing list.

> and yes, you can also do the cloudmark.com 'grey list' application,

I did that. I didn't get a bounce for this one. They say to wait 24hrs.

> usually, when there is only old single digit complaints it does not matter who 
> requests a review... When there is ongoing, recurring or chronic reports, then 
> it usually becomes more challenging :)

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!