I'm so baffled by this. One client is consistently unable to send mail, seemingly no matter what mail server he uses, due to a PBL advisory relating to authentication.
I've been going around in circles on this one for days now. Our own mail server is fine. His machine is definitely not spam infected as that would result in a different spamhaus message (one that i've successfully dealt with before). I'm losing hours to this. Damn
An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Service unavailable; Client host [78.16.165.249] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org; http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=78.16.165.249. Please check the message recipients and try again.
This message is actually from Donn's parent's connection which I knew was receiving the same errors. The problem with our client is that he's on eircom in the office, vodafone data card when out and about, perlico when at home, and various other wifi hotspots.
I did have some success just getting him to switch outgoing mail server on different connections, but even that seems to be running into errors now. I'm working on getting a proper body of errors together to send to our server admin.
Well we're getting to the bottom of the issue slowly.
Basically the PBL will not allow email to be sent unless it's authenticated. However it seems to be blocking email even when authentication is correctly enabled and fully working.
So there's something wrong with the PBL since it was combined with XBL and SBL lists of ZEN (they used to be 3 separate lists, I believe).
So as a test we switched off ZEN on our server yesterday and this morning there was about 2000 mails in all our inboxes of "spam backscatter". Our mail graphing utilities show some pretty intensive jumps in mail received.
I'm really glad we have mail graphing enabled actually. I can see that we've blocked nearly 6 million spam mails since the beginning of this year. God damn spam is unreal.
5 comments so far
I'm so baffled by this. One client is consistently unable to send mail, seemingly no matter what mail server he uses, due to a PBL advisory relating to authentication.
I've been going around in circles on this one for days now. Our own mail server is fine. His machine is definitely not spam infected as that would result in a different spamhaus message (one that i've successfully dealt with before). I'm losing hours to this. Damn
1 year, 1 month ago by alexleonard
Do you have a copy of the error message he sees? What type of internet connection does he have?
1 year, 1 month ago by ciotog
An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Service unavailable; Client host [78.16.165.249] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org; http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=78.16.165.249. Please check the message recipients and try again.
This message is actually from Donn's parent's connection which I knew was receiving the same errors. The problem with our client is that he's on eircom in the office, vodafone data card when out and about, perlico when at home, and various other wifi hotspots.
I did have some success just getting him to switch outgoing mail server on different connections, but even that seems to be running into errors now. I'm working on getting a proper body of errors together to send to our server admin.
1 year, 1 month ago by alexleonard
Very weird - I don't miss having to mess around with mail servers (did my own for awhile). A look across a full set of errors might turn up something.
1 year, 1 month ago by ciotog
Well we're getting to the bottom of the issue slowly.
Basically the PBL will not allow email to be sent unless it's authenticated. However it seems to be blocking email even when authentication is correctly enabled and fully working.
So there's something wrong with the PBL since it was combined with XBL and SBL lists of ZEN (they used to be 3 separate lists, I believe).
So as a test we switched off ZEN on our server yesterday and this morning there was about 2000 mails in all our inboxes of "spam backscatter". Our mail graphing utilities show some pretty intensive jumps in mail received.
I'm really glad we have mail graphing enabled actually. I can see that we've blocked nearly 6 million spam mails since the beginning of this year. God damn spam is unreal.
1 year, 1 month ago by alexleonard