How to participate, when your ISP is blacklisted?
Dear Lazy Web, how can I send messages to gtk-devel-list, when my public IP address (better the public IP address of a NAT router in Vodafone's network) is black listed? Using a smart host doesn't help, as that blocked IP address shows up in the "Received:" mail headers. Using web mail also doesn't help for the same reason.
Is it time to give up mail, and move all activities to web forums? I'd hate that.
PS: Yes, hanging in Vodafone's hotline to get them to resolve that issue.
PPS: Terminating the contract takes some time.
Update: Vodafone's technical support claims, this issue would not be their problem:
OpenRBL, SpamCop, Spamhaus, TQM³, NJABL, CBL, UCEPROTECT
Wow! That's what I call customer orientation.
Get a shell account outside Vodafone's network; ssh out to it; send the email from there.
Don't Vodafone ban various useful kinds of outgoing traffic, anyway? I was told that they don't like various kinds of IM packets.
Use gmail. It's free. You can set it up to forward your outgoing mail. You can retrieve your mail from it. You can even make it use your own domain name. You aren't forced to use the web UI.
Google has incredibly good spam filters. I wouldn't even dream of messing with my own public email server anymore.
Jon: Even using gmail, wouldn't help me to get rid of this mark of Cain this dirty IP address puts on me. Lack of Zombie prevention on Vodafone's side has caused my public IP address getting black listed.
Despite that: Google has enough information about me. No need to increase their data monopoly. Do we observe yet another market failure?
Gmail is a free, working solution to get around your problem. I think I read somewhere that 20% of all lkml subscriptions are from gmail accounts now. You can run gmail under your own domain name and mask that you are using it.
Another solution, use a host like dreamhost.com and set up mail forwarding. Its the same thing Google does but the spam filtering isn't as good and it will cost you $30/year (google for discount coupons). This is a cheap place to get a shell account, web server, etc. My www.digispeaker.com and git.digispeaker.com are hosted there. It's not 100% reliable but what do you want for $30?
There is no solution to cleaning up your IP other than changing ISPs.
Jon: Yup, looks like I have to change my ISP.
Next question: How do do that without going to court, considering that my contract runs for 11 months still? When moving to this flat Vodafone UMTS was the only Internet solution available, and they force you to do 24 month contracts.
Welcome to the world of monopolistic corporations.
Why don't you try the gmail solution for a week?
Maybe tor could be your solution http://www.torproject.org/
good luck with your isp.
Jon: Do you get commission for advertising them?
Felipe: Yes, also thought about using it already. Just considering it too much effort. Sending Vodafone some snail mail with problem description and request for termination now, since their hotline denies responsiblity for that problem.
Vodafone, your hotline is polite, but clueless. It used to be much better.
Dude, irrational fear of Google is just killing off a very viable option for the problem. I've personally never understood fear of data collection (oh noes, Google will see all those mails you send to public mailing lists... which their bots are already picking up off the public archives anyway).
You could also try a paid-for mail routing service, a la DynDNS's Outbound MailHop. I used that for a couple years as I'm on Comcast and it, along with most other DSL/Cable providors, is blocked from sending mail to main large ISPs. These days I have a VPS account with my own SMTP/IMAP setup I use for sending mails, and have no problems.
You mention that the blacklisted IP address shows up in the Received: headers, even with Web mail. I just sent myself an email from my Gmail account to another ("real") account, using the Web interface for sending. I wasn't able to find my IP address in the headers of the received email.
Please note that I'm *not* "Jon" from above, I used Gmail purely because it was the easiest for me to test rapidly. And I don't doubt your claims about the address in the Received headers, so much as I'm not sure how to replicate that.
I am really interested in this, though. Having been affected by blacklisting myself at times (have a static IP for my remote server, but can't choose my neighbors and RBLs cheerfully blacklist entire blocks), I'm always looking for solutions. I'll be interested in what you find out!
Unlike the various replies suggesting ways to work around the problem, I suggest solving the problem directly: apply a cluebat firmly and repeatedly to whoever thought a blacklist seemed like a good idea, until the mail server in question no longer uses a blacklist.
That would only shift the burden to the list subscribers.
John: Good to hear that GMail's webmailer is more sane than GMX' webmailer (by not inserting idiotic "Received" headers for web users).
Not seeing it mentioned, but it might be possible to use a VPS service to either act as your mail agent, or work with one of the freenets (or a vps) to set up a place to send e-mail from. As a worst case solution, ssh to the server, and use pine or even mail to send e-mail from that server rather than from your workstation.
I don't know if you could get it to work with Evolution, or Thunderbird.
A variation on that, which might work with Evolution and the like would be to set up a vpn that gives your workstation and the remote end of your tunnel a pair of addresses that you send the communications through, which would prevent the existing ISP's address from showing up in the message. It would also prevent any of their network filters from re-writing anything in the message.
Yes, considering to setup some kind of VPN between my local postfix and taschenorakel. Still have to find a solution, that doesn't tries to use TCP/IP as transport protocol (like all those OpenSSH based solutions), and works without adding network interfaces on taschenorakel (I am not allowed to do this).
Gmail doesn't record IPs in received headers. Simple.
Why is using TCP/IP due to OpenSSH a problem? If you make a TCP tunnel to taschenorakel, the Recieved line will have 127.0.0.1, not the NAT IP.
If you are really evil you could make /usr/sbin/sendmail a alias:
ssh taschenorakel /usr/sbin/sendmail
with passwordless. ssh keys set up. Even better, make it a nullmailer transport so you get a queque when you are offline.
Have you actually tried using a mail relay?
Very few mail hosts look at all Received lines for blacklisting. At most, they use it as part of a scoring system.
Johan: menubar.gnome.org, aka mail.gnome.org does.
Riku: I like your evil sendmail idea! Have to try it.
Using TCP tunnels for establishing a VPN is a bad idea, as usually the error recovery mechanism of the TCP/IP connection providing the tunnel, will collide with the error recovery mechanism of TCP/IP connections transported by the tunnel. Add this to the high error rate of an UMTS link, and you are screwed.