I have a customer who uses EarthLink for their POP mail and web hosting
<waits for laughter to die down>
The companies involved are construction companies grossing 10-50mil…not just little piddly outfits. My customer is having problems receiving email from some of his customers. I contact the IT people for one of the companies to see what the bounces look like if any. They were getting bounced by a service called mailspike that is some kind of a spam mitigation service that EarthLink uses.
They email mailspike and get told in no uncertain terms they will not unlist them.
Calling Earthink is like asking a drunk 5 year old for legal advice, but I do it anyway.
The first time I decided to amuse them and went along with logging into the webmail portal and checking the block list there (customer never touches this, they get mail via outlook) and they act astounded that this is not the problem even though I have explained the bounce messages in detail and emailed the tech a copy of it. I ask for more advanced techs and they give me an email address.
I have sent email requests for whitelising of the relevant domains and server IP addresses to earthlink support address provided and it has been weeks of nothing.
So how in the heck do you break out of a mess like this. I have told my customer we may need to switch email providers to get out from under this as I don’t think EarthLink is going to drop everything and fix this.
Will legal threats get them to stand up and take notice? All of the relevant customers have active relationships with lawyers due to the scale of their operations. Just seems like the nuclear option for a spam flagging.
The obvious knee-jerk capitalist answer is as always: Advise your customers to vote with their corporate wallets, and take their business elsewhere. Is there some reason they need to stay with Earthlink?
http://mailspike.org/iplookup.html
You could look up the ip addresses that are blacklisted to see if the fault is
really the problem at the sending email server, or fault with mailspike
You can contact mailspike directly.
There is a way to bypass earthlink’s anti-spam check.
You introduce an MX to be front of earthlink’s mail server . You run the new email server. Your server can then forward the email to earthlink’s server. There is the potential for earthlink to notice the MX change and take the domain out of their mail server (even deleting the stored email …)
I am still laughing at $100M a year relying on earthlink though…
All these customers must be doing something odd to be on the same blocklist - that is what would be concerning me (if I was your customer).
To be fair, this is not your (or your customers) problem - it is the problem of whoever is sending the email. They are the ones on a blocklist (and probably more than one) - if they want their email to be received, they need to take the proactive steps (contacting their ISP/mailspike) to get the problem resolved, or operate their email in an alternative way.
If I was an email admin, getting blocklist bounces would be high on my list of priorities to sort out (and I have, for my own emails, by using a paid-for email forwarding service).
The problem from my end is, the people whos mail is being blocked are the guys writing $300,000 checks to my customer. A simple “not my problem” could result in loss of customers to the tune of that kind of money. Supposedly we are the only ones not getting their mail. The only reason to stay with Earthlink is everything is there domain handling, web page hosting, mail, etc. I have explained to my customer how the problem is not really on our end it kinda turns into, his customer wants to make it my customers problem, so in turn it gets to be my problem.
If there’s that much money at stake, it sounds worth it for your customers to set up a new non-Earthlink email account to use with these people who are perpetually blocked. Make sure the new service has good whitelisting options. We keep ourbusiness@gmail.com for stuff like this.
That is what I have done as a workaround for now…just hoping for a more decisive angle. I have already mentioned it might be worth a nasty letter from his lawyer to make mailspike back off since he stands to lose 6 figures if next time the developer goes with different contractor due to “communications issues”.
This sounds kind of insane. Three figure billings, getting lawyers involved, all just to be able to stay with a service that does not suit their needs?
The thing to do is to leave the poor service for a service that does suit their needs. That is something you could help them with, instead of having to say “there’s nothing I can do.”
Moving them to a proper email service is fixing it.
There’s obviously a communication problem at work here. You need to find a way to rephrase the problem so that management will understand why the change is necessary.
There’s no fix for this problem, at least not until the entire email protocol gets trashed and re-invented.
I have seen this happen numerous times, and not just with obscure domains - recently, my folks couldn’t send email to me, because my email host was subscribing to a blacklist that had added their email domain to it. Their ISP is huge - it’s one of the biggest on the East Coast.
Unfortunately, everyone has their “deflector shields” up. Until the system is changed to prevent (or at least reduce) spam, these problems will keep happening.
