Tales and thoughts from the founder of NormSoft (maker of Pocket Tunes), working and living in St. Croix, USVI

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Another Case Against Blacklists

This was just too good to pass up.  Our customer support person just received this bounce and sent it to me for diagnostics:

From: MAILER-DAEMON@mail01h.rapidsite.net
Date: 4 Mar 2005 03:57:51 -0000
To: yyy@zzz.com
Subject: failure notice

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail01h.rapidsite.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
66.150.45.42 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 Mailbox unavailable. Your IP address 131.103.218.175 is blacklisted using SPAMCOP. Details: Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?131.103.218.175.
Giving up on 66.150.45.42.

So, if you'll follow me here: 131.103.218.175 is blacklisted.  That IP address is mail01h.rapidsite.net.  But that's the mail server that's receiving the email (and relaying it to someone else - presumably one of the ISP's customers).  So it's refusing to deliver mail because it is blacklisted, itself!

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