On Dec 14, I was notified by SD that my IP is banned. There was a link to contact the administrator and I sent five emails. Dec 19, I finally got a reply, form letter, asking my IP number, which they already knew because it was in the headers of all five emails. I sent my IP again and I’ve received no response yet (five days). The response I got indicated that very likely, my whole country was banned.
Googling, I found that it might be possible to change my IP. Turns out that I needed to turn off my broadband modem, let it reset, and turn it on again. If that procedure occurred to the SD webmaster, he did not mentilon it in his reply to my inquiry. So, I will be OK until my country gets range-banned again, and I’ll then know what to do.
Which begs two questions
Why doesn’t “click here” to message the Administrator get a timely reply, nor an informative one, but only asks me to repeat an IP number which has already been sent five times.
2, Presuming that spammers are more savvy than posters about the workings of the internet, a spammer could have reset his IP in ten munutes, which took me ten days without guidance. So, what was gained through the exercise?
(BTW, don’t just direct me to the FAQ about banned IP-- it is impossible to access that when your IP is banned and you suddenly need to know.)
jtur88 I can think of several ways it might be worth your while to follow up offline as requested. Perhaps you should do so, at least far enough to determine whether TPTB can help you with this type of problem in the future.
It would be nice to have an email address of at least one moderator, so if the problem recurs and I can’t resolve it by changing IP myself, there is someone I can report it to.
Unless you are running your own MTA from that address (possible, but very unlikely), your home gateway’s IP may or may not be in the headers of the message. The first Recieved-From header is normally for first hand off from the MTA that you authenticated against. The MTA you authenticated against almost assuredly logs your IP, but it isn’t required to add that IP to any of the message’s headers and it would be unusual for it to do so.
So, they could of gone on a fishing expedition in the headers of your email for something that’s almost certainly not there, or they could take the more reliable path of asking you for information that you actually should have included in your original request. You shouldn’t feel bad, people who are technical often up support requests without basic information necessary to identify and fix their problem. I’ve seen it enough to say it’s normal. However, your assumption here is incorrect.
Want more fun? If I’m sending E-mail to a gmail address, it won’t go through unless I have a VPN activated. That’s right: the VPN has to be active on my end. So, if the IP is banned and the folks you’re trying to contact have a gmail address, fire that veeper up and try, try again, little engine.