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SPAM,
RBL's and the Florida League of Cities |
We're sorry. If you were
directed to this page, you are probably an innocent mail user who's mail has
bounced back after trying to send it to one of our internal email addresses.
We'll try to explain what and why this has happened. You sent mail with a
destination address here at the Florida League of Cities (flcities.com). We,
the FLC, who run the mail server at this specific domain, have chosen to refuse
email from dangerously misconfigured, insecure, or abuseable servers based
on a list of several Realtime Blackhole Lists that we utilize. We do this
because blocking mail that originates from servers in these lists can significantly
reduce the amount of UCE (unsolicited commercial email), or spam, that users
of our mail server receive. Please don't misunderstand; we're not implying
that you send spam. The bounce message that you received simply means that
the administrator of your server either doesn't know he or she has an unsecured/misconfigured
server, or has chosen to run an open relay or open proxy. An open relay is
a mail server that will accept and deliver mail from anywhere to anywhere.
This is as opposed to properly configured mail servers, which will only accept
mail from or to their own site. Many spammers send spam through these relays,
which act as amplifiers and anonymizers for their messages. An RBL (Realtime
Blackhole List) is simply a list that contains all known IP addresses of open
relays and known spammers that is maintained by a 3rd party. When an email
is received, we first look up your email server's IP address, and see if it
matches an IP address on the RBL. If it matches, we reject the email
altogether.
If it doesn't match, it comes through, but then gets scrutinized by many other
filtering techniques. We utilize the following 6 RBLs:
Of course, you want your
mail to go through. In order for this to happen, your City, Town, County,
District, School, Company or Internet Provider needs to fix their mail server.
As soon as your IT Staff or ISP Provider fixes their server and requests removal
from the particular RBL that is causing you to be blocked, your mail will
start going through again.
Important: In
many instances, Companies, Towns, Cities, etc... are signing up with
dynamically assigned broadband connections like Bellsouth/Sprint DSL,
Roadrunner/Adelphia Cable or various Wireless 802.11 ISPs. Basically,
being on these 'dial-up' ranges that you share with many other home users
might get you blocked as well by the RBLs we use. The reason being,
since these dynamic IP ranges were designed for home use, a legitimate company
running a mailserver should not be on a dynamic range, but instead, should be
on a static IP. Many spammers target home users and companies running
mailservers in the dynamic IP ranges, and has gotten to be so prevalent, that
many RBLs are just blocking these entire ranges altogether. ISPs are
also taking steps to prevent users in the dynamic IP ranges to host servers or
sending mail out using mailservers using their home computers. If you do
wish to remain on a dynamic IP and continue to send email out, you will need
to configure your mailserver to send all mail to the nearest smarthost, ie.
your ISP's mailserver. Your ISP will then relay your mail for you to the
correct recipient.
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But
my IT staff/ISP Provider says that we aren't an open relay!
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By visiting specific pages
at the 6 RBL's we are currently utilizing, you should be able to obtain your
email servers' IP address(es), and see if it's been listed on one of these RBL's
by utilizing the links below. In many cases, they will actually show you the
actual spam that was able to traverse itself through your email server originating
from an outside spammer. Click on the following links to query the individual
RBL's databases using your email servers' IP address:
If you still can't find your email server
listed on one of these RBL sites, try the following:
1.) If you have more than 1 email
server, did you try your other mailservers' IP addresses? You should do an
MX lookup for your domain to determine this.
2.) Are you absolutely sure your mailserver is sending the mail out, and
not being smarthosted by someone else? If it's being smarthosted, try
their IP.
If after these suggestions, you still
don't see how we're blocking you, we may be manually blocking your IP or domain
based on spam we may have received from you in the past. The other
possibility might be that we may be blocking you because you inherited your IP
or domain from a previously known spammer, and we are simply not aware that this
change has been made. In either case, please contact me with your
questions below.
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Other
useful tools to check and see if you're on a Blacklist! |
If you want to check to see
if you're on any other blacklists, try these handy-dandy tools:
Please don't hesitate to
contact me if you have any questions regarding our SPAM prevention policy,
or help in general securing your server, checking & testing your
mailserver against our block lists, or advice on removing your IP address from
one of the above RBL's.