Your Mailserver is listed at www.sorbs.net

[oxo]

When I tried to register at http://www.factorio.com the confirmation email was blocked by my mailserver since you're listed at http://www.sorbs.net. Because it is my very own mailserver I was able to whitelist your mailserver, but of course I would have been out of luck, if it wasn't my own server.

Summary information for 167.89.100.168/32:
13 "Spam" entries [14:09:17 24 Nov 2017 GMT+00].

You should inform your Emailprovider to get removed from the blacklist. And don't come to the wrong conclusion it is my own fault to use sorbs. Your Emailprovider should not allow to send spam in the first place.

[Zavian]

And don't come to the wrong conclusion it is my own fault to use sorbs. Your Emailprovider should not allow to send spam in the first place.

Personally I disagree pretty vehemently. In my experience these email block lists are quite happy to punish innocent companies (eg Wube and Factorio), without warning or even any attempt at notifying the hosting company/isp, simply because they happen to use the same ip address as an alleged spammer. (In many cases it might even be the same ip address block, or even the same isp as a spammer). They do this without making any attempt to report the spam or contact the hosting company/isp either prior to implementing the block, or after implementing the block. That sort of behaviour is irresponsible, bordering on attempted blackmail.

Their entire strategy is to punish those innocent companies in the hope they will put enough pressure on the hosting companies/isps, that they will lock down internet access enough that nobody can send spam. It will never work. Think about it. In today's internet economy, if you want a web presence, (and why else would you be dealing with a hosting company), you will want to be able to send order confirmations/acknowledgements/receipts/invoices/answer queries/run a customer forum/mailing list etc, all of which require the ability to send emails. It is just not practical for a hosting company offering business class service to lock down their network such that their customers can't send emails. Any company that tried to do so would be committing business suicide.

Since they can't lock down their network, maybe they can be persuaded to refuse to doing business with spammers. Again won't work. How can a hosting company reliably vet potential customers (who might be located anywhere in the world), to make sure none of them are spammers, without also making it impossible to attract new customers? Answer is it can't. Best it can realistically do is investigate and shut them down when someone reports a problem. And here again the spam blocklists tend to fail. Typically they never even bother to report the spam to the hosting company/isp. They just implement a block. That block can potentially persist even after someone else reports the spam and the hosting company takes measures to shut it down. Again innocent companies are punished for no fault of their own. I recall seeing news reports of companies that went bankrupt because they lost contracts after emails were blocked. Blocking without at least attempting to notify the hosting company/isp is just irresponsible.

Also don't forget that at least some of the spam probably comes from responsible companies who have been hacked, and have had spam sending software installed without their knowledge. Realistically no amount of prior vetting is going to completely stop that. I do agree that in at least some cases the hosting companies can and should do more to make sure their clients systems are secure, but that still doesn't justify punishing their other clients (innocent companies like Wube) without at least attempting to report the problem to the hosting company/isp.

Back when I used my ISP's email account for personal mail I lost email from my father because my ISP used one of these email block lists and Telstra.com had it's entire email server for probably 1 million residential customers blacklisted because apparently someone reported it had sent some spam. I also lost mails from reputable organisations like Debian, because some spam emails to debian mailing lists got through debian's spam filters, got sent to list recipients, and got reported as spam. So lists.debian.org with hundreds of mailing lists and probably hundreds of thousands of subscribers got blacklisted repeatedly. Now days I no longer use my isp's email.

[oxo]

While I understand your concern, please try to understand my point of view:

Just for you, I checked my "mail.log" for the past five days:
My mailserver recieved 6500 mails that were NOT blocked, but I've also (not) recieved 2400 mails blocked by sorbs and additional 700 mails blocked by spamhaus.

So my Ham to Spam ratio is about 2:1, while about half of the "Ham" is also Spam, but just not blocked by sorbs or spamhaus.

I really don't want to get Spam, and ONE of many possibilities to avoid spam is using a blacklist. I'm well aware, some innocent mailer are blocked too, that's why I whitelisted the factorio mailserver, but my whitelisting doesn't do anything at sorbs or for other people who also use sorbs.

Factorio mails WILL be blocked by others or go straight to the spamfolder dependend how other administrators chose to handle spam, best recommendation is to get unlisted at sorbs.

[Koub]

There are litterally hundreds - maybe even thousands - such systems, all autonomous. Imagine if the devs had to do it for each one individually .

[oxo]

There are litterally hundreds - maybe even thousands - such systems, all autonomous. Imagine if the devs had to do it for each one individually .

And there you can check them all at once:
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?ac ... n=toolpage

A responsible mailserver administrator will keep his server always off of all blacklists, because it costs a company money if emails doesn't come thru, like Zavian pointed out already.

[Zavian]

Being unable to contact customers/suppliers by mail is bad, and can cost companies money. Having your customers/suppliers unable to contact you is just as bad and can cost you just as much money. When you implement email blocklists, you are the one putting up a wall and potentially stopping new customers from contacting you. When you choose to use an email blocklist you are essentially saying to potential customers, I don't value your potential business enough that I'm going to make sure I can accept your emails. Sooner or later a email from a customer will get blocked, and at that point you may lose that customer, and never get them back.

Also whilst a responsible mailserver admin might decide to attempt to keep his mailserver off of all blacklists, most small to medium sized business that are using hosting services are unlikely to actually achieve that in practice. Sooner or later some other customer of the hosting service will send some spam, and suddenly innocent companies might be affected. (Remember what I said about about losing emails from my father? A major Australian ISP was blocking emails from residential customers of another major Australian ISP).

[oxo]

...Sooner or later some other customer of the hosting service will send some spam, and suddenly innocent companies might be affected. ...

Those "innocent" companies are part of the problem, since they chose a cheap provider or a provider that doesn't care about spam. There are good reasons why the big emailprovider are almost never affected by those blacklists, either because they are already whitelisted or they invest the time and effort to get off of the blacklist.

It isn't easy to fight spam, and blacklists are just a small part of the solution, but for my own company I chose to use blacklists rather than a spamfolder, because the sender is immediately informed that the email didn't go thru, while a mail in a spam folder may rot until the end of the days, since nobody can be bothered to monitor his spamfolder on a daily base.