yep, that is the standard message charter is sending for too much mail from a range of addresses under the same ISP that they don’t like. Most of the other email providers at least put the word “range” into the message, but charter seems to be happy sending us on an endless chase to try to convince them that we are not sending too much mail.

There really is no way to get unblocked at Charter right now. I had one address that worked and 5 others that didn’t, but there is no way to know when more addresses might get added to the blocked range.

I believe the only way to have this fixed at DO is for DO to isolate a set of addresses for outbound email and then allow us to request them with an explanation of what email will be sent. But then DO would need a way to shutdown or punish offenders and that is more overhead on them.

So… sendgrid or aws sms or one of the other services out there. The situation is way beyond frustrating....

Hey friend!

Honestly, they block a good portion of hosting company IPs from sending them email. It’s pretty hit or miss, and even if you get through on an IP one day it might be blocked the next (especially if you ever forward email, which ensures the delivery of spam). Some major SMTP services like SendGrid (just one example) might have better luck on average than going at it alone.

I know that doesn’t offer a quick fix but this is something I’ve seen so many times that I’ve kind of given up on the idea that a quick fix exists for this particular situation. I hope my perspective was at least helpful :)

Jarland

SendGrid has a great service, but at some point we had decided to just handle it ourselves. You’re right though, sending email is easy but actually getting it delivered is an ongoing challenge.

So a few more items to help add context:

• We don’t forward any emails.
• We do send email on behalf of clients. If they have an SPF record in place we allow a from email address using their domain. If they don’t have an SPF record in place, we send under our domain with a reply-to set to their domain. Our clients are all non-profits and they only send email to their membership, so there shouldn’t be much unexpected mail.
• We have DKIM signing in place and working.
• Mail reputation is high
• no black lists
• I have a clean report on mxtoolbox, other then it doesn’t like the SO records for DO DNS.
• I check the logs and the only bad email we ever sent was a unknown address because of a typo when it was entered, and there is only a hand full of those.

It takes a lot to try to keep the email reputation high and then suddenly I this back…

(host mx1.charter.net[68.114.188.69] said: 452 4.1.1 Too much mail from this address E2210 (in reply to RCPT TO command))

And just to add some perspective to that, I don’t think we’ve ever gone over 50 emails to charter.net in a day with a smtp concurrency limit set to 1 with 10s delay. Too many??

I’m a little frustrated :-)

Look at your bounce e-mail. Often there will be instructions for getting off of their bad list. Back when I was on shared hosting, I had to go through the hoops to get my e-mail going through to different mail servers. I did not wait for the host to take care of it, I took care of it myself, and even though I was not the administrator of the shared server, I was always able to get it fixed.

Does the bounce e-mail give any info?

Wayne Sallee
Wayne@WayneSallee.com

Also make sure that your MX record ends in “-all” and not “~all”.
This tells other servers to discard any e-mail pretending to be from you but not sent from your server.

Wayne Sallee
Wayne@WayneSallee.com

I know this is a month old thread, but I have been having the same problem for around that month now. Charter tells you to create a new email and attach the body of blocked emails to ’unblock@charter.net’ for their review. When you send the report, as they request, that email is also blocked because it’s from the blocked domain or IP. So, you create a new email from a different address and send that, but get no response or action from them. I called their 800 line and went four or five techs deep until I got a supervisor who refused to even get on the phone with me to discuss. They would not help me because I am not their customer. Their answer? The customer has to call them. That means contacting the recipient of an email, in this case a receipt from an online store, and ask them to call on your behalf to get your server unblocked, probably spending hours on the phone with them. It’s just stupid, and shows how little these ISPs care about their own customers, let alone anyone else. I never thought I would see someone worse than Comcast. Spectrum and Charter are certainly making a strong case.

Still fighting the battle and could use a little input on postfix.

I pulled my postfix logs for the days leading up to the “block” from charter.net, filtered to smtp and error processes and I can see no more than 20 connections to charter.net per hour. Charter insists that I am sending in excess of 600 per hour. When I shared my data they recommended I have geek squad look at my device because somebody is getting through my firewall and sending from my IP address. My assertion would be that if somebody is using my server as a relay, I would see the outbound smtp connections in the postfix log? Is this a valid assertion?

And while on the topic of postfix, I have:

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks
virtual_alias_domains = mydomain.com
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

Which I believe should allow allow connections from addresses explicitly listed in mynetworks or that are sending to addresses listed in virtual. Is there something I am missing here?

From what I can tell, the 20 connections are mine and are expected.

How would it bypass the postfix logs? You are thinking I have a PHP script doing a direct SMTP connection?

I don’t even know how somebody would trigger that. I only have port 25, 4444 and 443 open. I use 4444 for ssh and it only allows connection with a certificate, 443 would be apache and I would see something burping out of that. 25 is postfix and I described that config above.

I guess I could use netstat or something similar to double check outgoing connections.

It seems remarkable that nobody else would be complaining. But, unlike Charter, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong or that I missed something.

I was just informed by Spectrum engineers today after spending 2 weeks/16 hours on the phone trying to address this same problem that they have supposedly blocked 100% of Digital Oceans ip addresses and do not allow individual whitelisting for any ip address under the “Digital Ocean Umbrella”..

If the mail server resides on a Digital Ocean equipment they say its permanently blocked..

Is there anything digital ocean can do to help here? Sendgrid isn’t inexpensive, so this will essentially double my hosting costs by adding send grid to my infrastructure. The other choice is to look at other hosting, but I suppose I could easily hit the same issue in other places as well.