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RANT- Anyone ever have to deal with barracudacentral.org?

 
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kal
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Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2012 10:32 pm    Post subject: RANT- Anyone ever have to deal with barracudacentral.org? Reply with quote


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Barracudacentral.org is a service used by email providers to block spam. If you get listed with them, then there's a good chance your emails won't get through.

Barracudacentral.org has my dedicated server IP (20.225.20.162) blacklisted causing some mail to bounce back with messages like:

(reason: 554 Service unavailable; Client host [lded1.atcihosting.com] blocked using Barracuda Reputation; http://www.barracudanetworks.com/reputation/?r=1&ip=206.225.20.162)


Upon investigating, turns out that they've actually blacklisted what appears to be EVERY SINGLE IP owned by my hosting company:

206.225.16.[1-255]
206.225.17.[1-255]
206.225.18.[1-255]
206.225.19.[1-255]
206.225.20.[1-255]
206.225.21.[1-255]
206.225.22.[1-255]
206.225.23.[1-254]

Basically anything that resolves to a HOSTIRIAN.COM or ATCIHOSTING.COM server (Hostirian bought out ATCHosting a few years ago) seems to be blacklisted. There may be others.

Hostirian's been looking into it for a week now, barracudacentral.org isn't answering my emails. Probably because they use their own spam lists. Wink (I don't always get a bounce back which is worse... sometimes clients just don't get my emails).

Everyone else gives these IPs a clean bill of health when I check with:

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Googling barracudacentral.org comes up with all sorts of issues about them being non-responsive. Their spam checking software uses heuristics or other automated means to mark IPs as spam which makes it fast/intantaneous.

I'm getting very annoyed!

Kal

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kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2012 10:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

For my own records:

I resubmitted yet another request to be removed from their lists on Dec 19, 2012. Confirmation number is BBR21355956736-51604-27728.

Text submittted (along with IP, email, phone number):

Quote:
You seem to have blacklisted every single IP owned by my hosting company:

206.225.16.[1-255]
206.225.17.[1-255]
206.225.18.[1-255]
206.225.19.[1-255]
206.225.20.[1-255]
206.225.21.[1-255]
206.225.22.[1-255]
206.225.23.[1-254]

Basically anything that resolves to a HOSTIRIAN.COM or ATCIHOSTING.COM server (Hostirian bought out ATCHosting a few years ago) seems to be blacklisted.

Why? I'm in the middle of this IP range and run a dedicated server with 2 websites that sends out emails to opt-in only newsletter subscribers, forum notifications, and email responses to customers writing to me directly.

The two sites are:

www.TheElectricBrewery.com
www.CurtPalme.com

I am not blacklisted anywhere else. I'm not sure why I'm blacklisted here. It's affecting my bottom line running my businesses.

Thank you.


I swear you spend about 80% of your time running a business doing things that are not core to progress or your actual business.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
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dunnry




Joined: 10 Oct 2012
Posts: 43
Location: Strongsville, OH


PostLink    Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 6:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is why most folks do not run STMP servers from their own dedicated machines much anymore. When I worked for Microsoft, we always advised folks running in Windows Azure (cloud platform) to never run their own SMTP server, but to offload that to a dedicated provider. Two good choices offhand that I have some experience with is SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com/) and MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com).

Those guys take care of the hard stuff (e.g DomainKeys, Analytics, Bounce, and Spam report tracking). Well worth it.

Speaking of which... I wonder if you would not be better off hosting this site in Windows Azure.
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kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 9:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dunnry wrote:
This is why most folks do not run STMP servers from their own dedicated machines much anymore. When I worked for Microsoft, we always advised folks running in Windows Azure (cloud platform) to never run their own SMTP server, but to offload that to a dedicated provider. Two good choices offhand that I have some experience with is SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com/) and MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com).

Those guys take care of the hard stuff (e.g DomainKeys, Analytics, Bounce, and Spam report tracking). Well worth it.

You make a very valid point.

Really all I need an SMTP server for outgoing mail. One with a clean IP.

I have various software on my server that sends out emails such as phplist (newsletters), forums, and and Drupal for people purcashing my book. Then there's also the mail I type and send directly myself in response to questions.

So I don't need some of the fancy newsletter creation/queueing/throttling services that some of them seem to provide. My Home Theatre website sends a lot more newsletters (25,000 users) and it takes a full day for it to go out since they're done one at a time (I'm ok with that).

I have no idea how much mail I actually send per month with everything combined (undre 100K?), but I'm trying to avoid the $200/month services when I do have an SMTP server on my server already. If it was $10-20 month I'd jump right on it just to have an SMTP server with a "clean" IP to use. Would be simply to change too, I'd just point my apps to a different IP with a different username/password. I could even keep the POP servers on my own server of course.

Any suggestions on SMTP services like this?

Quote:
Speaking of which... I wonder if you would not be better off hosting this site in Windows Azure.


What benefits do you see in doing that? I have to say I haven't looked into any other platforms simply because of the pain of moving. Everything I run is HTML, SHTML, PHP, and MySQL based.

I did some quick math and it appears to be similarly priced to what I pay now for the volumes I do. I have a reasonably low end dedicated machine now does about 300-400 Gb/month of bandwidth. Not much in terms of storage space needed. Disc space used is tiny (10Gb). I pay $99/month now.

Either way, thanks for the suggestions! It's really appreciated and has gotten me thinking!

Kal

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We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
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dunnry




Joined: 10 Oct 2012
Posts: 43
Location: Strongsville, OH


PostLink    Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 10:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Silver package at SendGrid is $79/mo - which includes 100K emails plus all the bells and whistles. You could also opt for something like MailChimp's Mandrill, which forgos the newsletter type model and is more like SendGrid. That one runs $10 for 62k mails and .90 each additional 1k.

Both of those feature drop in replacements (just point your SMTP server to them) for SMTP. Here is SendGrid's for instance (http://sendgrid.com/docs/Integrate/Open_Source_Apps/index.html).

You can get much fancier with these services as well and use them programmatically via API. I know SendGrid supports Newsletters (http://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Newsletter_API/index.html). I am not sure about Mandrill's support for newsletters, but the regular MailChimp is great for newsletters (though, that would be pricey for 25K subs).

Now, I have not used this service myself, but Amazon has SES with an SMTP gateway as well (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/SMTP.html). The price is fantastic at only .10 per 1k (http://aws.amazon.com/ses/#pricing). That would mean 100K emails would only run you $10. It appears to be slightly more barebones service in terms of features, but deliverability should be pretty good here.

You can certainly run your dedicated VM anywhere - Amazon EC2 is also a good choice. The reason I suggested Windows Azure is that it is a managed PaaS environment. You would no longer have to actually maintain the VM you reside on - patching, hardware, etc.. So, if you are not interested in being a sysadmin, you can get what is called a worker or web role in Windows Azure that will simply run the website for you. Windows Azure will seamlessly upgrade the OS under the covers and recover from failures for you (> 99% uptime). Additionally, you can leverage other features like the CDN caching for your site's graphic assets. That means those will be served from origins closer to your viewers - (much faster site). There are other features as well. If you wanted... and since I just happen to be one of the people most knowledgeable about Windows Azure in the world at the moment, I could evaluate what it would take for you to actually migrate. Contact me offline if you would like and I might even be able to help you do it.
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kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 2:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks! Lots to think about. I'm going to do some research into some of these services though time will be tight over the next few days. My ISP is still (supposedly) talking to barracudacentral.org but I think I need to get off using my internal SMTP server like you mentioned. The Amazon services seem interesting so I'll probably look into that first.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
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View user's photo album (21 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fast forward to today... I'm still blacklisted with Barracuda after my hosting company has put in multiple requests to be de-listed (or explain why it's listed). They've never heard from them.

dunnry wrote:
Now, I have not used this service myself, but Amazon has SES with an SMTP gateway as well (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/SMTP.html). The price is fantastic at only .10 per 1k (http://aws.amazon.com/ses/#pricing). That would mean 100K emails would only run you $10. It appears to be slightly more barebones service in terms of features, but deliverability should be pretty good here.


So I've signed up for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to get access to Simple Email Service [SES] and we'll see how it goes.

My concern is the low price. It sees rediculously low compared to other service providers but I'm assuming it's only because Amazon is obviously huge and they *already* have a massive infrastructure in place. This is not their bread and butter either.

Eventually I may move everything over...

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
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