Question

DigitalOcean's IP space blocked by Yahoo. Anyone know a good mail provider to send email (Not spam)? ( Cheap but reliable )

Posted January 25, 2015 8.3k views

Hi Guys,

My systems send emails ( Not spam ) but emails to clients etc. It can be a few hundred a day at the moment. Mostly chat logs etc from my support system.

However, The Digital Ocean IP I have ( and possibly the subnet ) is blocked by Yahoo :(

Annoyingly I have an email on yahoo so I dont get mails from the servers either.

Anyone know a good supplier I can relay through?

I can only guess the people before me must of been naughty with their IP’s and have clearly screwed me slightly as now my new server address is blocked.

Thanks
G

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8 answers
rascul January 25, 2015

Check if the IP in question is on a blacklist. I can verify that Yahoo is not blocking DigitalOcean on the whole.

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IMsupporting January 25, 2015

I know its blacklisted. Yahoo’s servers come back saying so when my server tries to send. ( Both of my servers are )

Never had the problem on other hosts and these have been denied mail access from the very start, so whoever had the IP’s before were clearly spamming.

I’ve requested that the IP’s be unblocked by as normal yahoo just ignore the requests.

:(

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jay986365 January 25, 2015

Maybe your mail server is miss configured, so it’ll be blocked by Yahoo. In most cases it’s because the headers, or missing SPF records etc. etc.

If you would like, we could analyse your configurations.

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  • IMsupporting January 25, 2015

    Thats not the case. The mailserver says that the IP is blocked.

    Its not misconfigured and every single other ISP i send to is fine.

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  • vps January 25, 2015

    One thing you could try is snapshot the server create a new server from snapshot. (You may want to try to move snapshot to different location if location is of high importance.) The snapshot will have a new ip.

    If lucky you won’t get a blacklisted ip. Have had my server with DO for over a year. Not on any blacklist and I can send to Yahoo email just fine. So its just a matter of getting new clean ip.

    Once the new server is up test to see if new ip is on any blacklist and also send mail to a yahoo account. If all is good just change your dns info to point to new server and destroy your old one. Depending on how long this takes you may need to sync some mail over. If only down for short time just shutdown mail service on original server. The sending mail server should retry to send it.

    Not sure if you can actually get yahoo to release a block. Seems stupid to permanently ban ips knowing full well they get recycled and spammers move on to unblocked addresses.

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IMsupporting January 26, 2015

@vps Yeah, I did think about doing this. I guess this will be my last option.

Thanks for the feedback. i suspect this is what Ill do when the platform is a little less busy.

-G

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I3litz January 26, 2015

Don’t even waste time using MTA on your servers, use Mandrill (mandrillapp.com) or mailchip (mailchimp.com) depending on your needs, If you know about how to configure your MTA you can set it to use mandrill as smart relay, but that is a little more advance, also you can use php to send using mandrill’s app.

You get up to 12k email at month for free, so don’t worry about investing any money to replace MTA.

Remember to hearth ;-)

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IMsupporting January 30, 2015

Thanks EpicCDN

I have decided to use mandrill and so far VERY pleased!

I managed to get php to also use mandrill by changing how sendmail works by installing msmtp.

Guide for others | centos 7

yum install epel-release
yum install msmtp

Created a new config file for it in /etc/msmtprc
With the following info in the file:

account Test
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_certcheck off
auth on
host smtp.mandrillapp.com
user MYUSERNAME
from noreply@mydomain.com
password MYPASSWORD
logfile /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log

Then I modified the php.ini file. ( commenting out the old line for sendmail )

;sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i
sendmail_path = "/usr/bin/msmtp -C /etc/msmtprc -a Test -t -i"

Restarted apache and POW it works.

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  • I3litz February 10, 2015

    @IMsupporting Awesome, I use sendmail as mta, so in my case was no need to modify php.ini, yet whatever solution fits is a great improvement not to relay on your own server to manage emails, you save your self a great pain in the arss :). Glad you tried.

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  • IMsupporting February 10, 2015

    @EpicCDN Id be interested how to managed to get sendmail to natively talk to mandrill? ( If thats something you did? )

    I couldnt get it to work no matter what lol..

    Reply Report
  • I3litz February 10, 2015

    Let me show you, it was super easy actually, at least on CentOS, maybe it varies from distro to distro at least where you need to compile sendmail.mc file.

    edit:

    /etc/mail/sendmail.mc

    add or uncomment:

    define(SMART_HOST',smtp.mandrillapp.com’)dnl

    /etc/mail/access

    add:

    AuthInfo:smtp.mandrillapp.com “U:smmsp” “I:mandrillacount@here” “P:apikey-here”

    makemap hash /etc/mail/access.db < /etc/mail/access

    make

    service sendmail restart

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  • IMsupporting February 10, 2015

    Hhaha, That seems to simple lol.. I spent ages looking for a way to just get sendmail to work but nothing came up.

    So decided to just kill sendmail and use something else.

    Ill give it a try!
    I have a feeling that these posts will help others in the future!

    Reply Report
autorun March 1, 2015

This happened to me, and I’ve already had set SPF/TXT record. The problem was that PTR records don’t match. To set PTR record just change your Droplet’s name to your server’s domain name. DigitalOcean will automatically set the value for the PTR record. That worked! You don’t have to use any other mail service (if you just want to send mail).

Gmail, Yahoo and many others uses your PTR record to double check that the sender’s servername (in this case, your server) matches the server’s IP.

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danielatocan March 13, 2015

any suggestions for a ispconfig3 sstem with postfix and ubuntu? I did change 3 times the DO ip fort his and yahoo blocks again.

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