I would like to say thank you to PlusNet for making this decision. I am sorry if I was shouting a lot earlier today, but it was only today that I realised which important mails I was losing. Prior to that I knew I was losing a couple of fairly insignificant ones, but I knew I had a potential solution to that problem.

As if by magic, a bunch of emails sent earlier today have now arrived in my mailbox, it remains to be seen whether any from other days will follow.

My suggestion for the re-introduction would be to detect the problems with DNS and dynamic addresses and then flag them in some way rather than blocking them. Perhaps they could be marked in the Subject field in a similar way to the [-SPAM-] mails (although with different text, not the word SPAM please). Then we could tackle the problems either by whitelisting or by asking third parties to fix their broken configurations, but NOT lose the emails in the mean time. This might take some time, certainly longer than the few days warning we had this time.

We all know how much of a problem Spam is, and I applaud PlusNet for doing all they can to fight it, but I do think they took their time in realising how much of a problem they had caused to their paying customers, and probably a lot more of them than the ones posting here.

I will not be leaving PlusNet just yet, they get yet another chance with me and my handful of referred customers. In many ways I still think they are the best, and we forget this a lot of the time. Just compare the little details with other ISPs. For example did you know that BT Internet don't even provide IMAP servers?

PlusNet - pleeeease get it right second time around.

Won't work.
People change ISP's and get new email addresses every day - do you want to blacklist them?

Can I suggest that PlusNet contacts all senders of mail which have "undesiredable DNS entries" and only used a reverse DNS lookup as one more datum in the "is it spam" identification. I would not expect an email which mentions viagra to be accepted, regardless of the beuty of its DNS entries.

I'd assume ISPs would have correct configurations, so that wouldn't be an issue. Really, it should be the email users that contact that companies which have misconfigured mailing servers, as it is too big a task for PlusNet to effectively contact every mail server controller/forwarding system to tell them the problem. If you have e-mail that you know is legitimate, you should make sure they know the faults in their system. As has been documented before, it isn't only PlusNet who is doing this, and in the future a lot more will be doing it, so changes would need to be made sooner or later.

My 2p.

Re Paul_B message - 1and1.co.uk were certainly being blocked too (I use them), until I reported it and thankfully PN whitelisted them.

PN have certainly made a complete mess of this issue and it is incredible that their email status still does not even show a current problem! I wonder how many customers are still not aware that PN have been blocking their email?

It is definitely NOT acceptable for PN customers to have to contact their Contacts or Domain Name hosts to ask them to change their systems in order to be able to receive emails again!  If other companies ideally ought to fix their email system configuration, at the very least PN themselves should be doing the liaising, and not blocking them in the meantime.

We never have to wait very long for PN to stagger from one problem to the next.

I am torn now.

I want to applaud PlusNet for being pioneering (as they often have been), but it often seems to lead them into shambles like this one, which is very very frustrating!

Please can we have better time-scales on changes like this, that meant you don't have to repeatedly say after the event "we didn't think we would have this many problems".

Part of the scoping for the project should have been a risk analysis, which identified how many of your customer base's genuine emails were being received from sources likely to be affected, and how will resolve this if it becomes an issue.

It should have been a gradual roll out over at least two months, which good communication at every stage.

Not the shambles we got.

Please keep working on this Spam blocking solution, we want you to work on it... but DON'T roll it out again until it is ready for the prime time, with a system to alert users to emails they are losing, to give a chance to resolve this issue.

Mike

I hope Plusnet re-introduce this system as it is the correct way of dealing with e-mail.
There was clearly a problem with their dynamic IP detection as from reading this thread some of the mail they appeared to be rejecting was coming from a static IP mail server.

Other companies and ISP's use this method of filtering so no legitimate business can realistically expect to host a mail server from their own dynamically assigned IP address; in order to ensure all there mail gets through they need to use a legitimate relay.

Think you have to ask PN whether PN and Force9 business accounts with static IP addresses will be class as static IP's by other ISP's

I know that my static IP is probably being classed as dynamic by the likes of AOL and Hotmail, thus being blocked. Will PN reclassify my IP with RIPE?

As I pointed out in another thread there all classed as dynamic.
http://www.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=84.92.197.0

RIPE only deal with IP blocks

Plusnets 'choice' to give you a 'static' IP has nothing to do with RIPE classifying it as dynamic.

Unfortunately, there is no way around this.  More and more ISP's are starting to reject mail from dynamic IPs, favouring receiving mail only from static blocks (such as ISP 'own-use' netblocks, and larger commercial netblocks).  This is in an attempt to 'encourage' smaller users to relay through their ISP.  That way, if you do start generating spam, they have a method of recourse through your ISP.

This *is* going to become more prevalent.  Those people running their own mail servers *will* have to change the way they work as more and more ISPs employ blocking like this.

B.

So how many businesses are out there that have been given static IP's by their ISP but don't know that these will be classed as dynamic?

When a lot of their e-mail gets bounced I presume they will quickly realise.
You also need a reasonable amount of intelligence to setup a system such as MS Exchange so hopefully the SysAdmin will know the difference.

So far I'm only aware of AOL and Hotmail doing this.

The only reason that I run my email server is because of all the problem PN have had with the email service for the last 18 months. Admittedly the problems have be delivery not sending but I still want to be in control of both parts.

3 months down the line - when the whitelists have been painstakingly built up - how will that help when a new customer tries to contact my business?

They have never been a customer before, so can not possibly be on the whitelist. They email, get rejected, and turn somewhere else.

Could customers (especially business customers) choose to be exempt from this filtering?

As do I but I use Plusnet's relay server for sending and I have never had any problems.

I don't get it; do you mean a new Plusnet customer?
Customers don't get white listed, mail servers do, and a regular customer will be using a normal mail server so there wont be any problems.

I imagine this filtering is one of the first lines of defence, long before customer types have been classified.

Good decision plusnet. I commend you for listening to your customers and point out to others that there are a whole load of ISP's who would have stuck their heads in the sand and not acted.

So despite the problems I reckon you have been seen to do the right thing for your customers, excellent.

I think Tony means:
A new customer of his (say a small business with it's own dodgy email server) tries to email him. They are not on PlusNet's whitelist yet. How do they get onto PlusNet's whitelist. I think Tony is concerned about ongoing adding to the whitelist. There is likely to be a concerted effort to start with, so that next time this happens it does so more smoothly, but he is right to be asking about beyond that initial setup period.

If email from one of his customers (or worse a prospective customer) gets rejected by PlusNet and returned to sender, they might just take their business to someone else, rather then use Tony. The professionalism of Tony's business is being judged by PlusNet's handling of his emails. It might still be that prospective customers mail server that is at fault, but Tony might lose business over this. He is right to be asking the questions.


Given the above, I think asking if there will be a chance for business customers to opt out is a fair question. The answer might be "no", but you can understand from a business risk situation why a current PlusNet business customer might decide keeping emails with PlusNet is not a risk they want to carry, if they might lose customers over it. They would rather get a few extra spams, than lose thousands (or tens of thousands) of pounds worth of business per missed email. Especially if he has no notice that he even missed a mail. How can he tell he has missed something to get it added to the whitelist? It is a catch 22. If he got it, he wouldn't need to report it. If he didn't get it, he doesn't know he didn't get it to be able to report it.

This needs some careful thought, to become a long term sustainable, and genuinely useful spam blocking feature... rather than becoming just a pain for customers of PlusNet.