Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Mail Server Woes...

About three weeks ago, hackers from China hijacked two of my customers' email accounts and sent as much spam as they could through my mail server in the 16 hours before it was detected and stopped.  Two and a half weeks later, Gmail still won't accept mail from my server.  It sends fewer than 200 messages total per day.  A small fraction of those are headed to Gmail's server.  I put a revised spam filter in place so the traffic is scrubbed with about 50% greater accuracy than before - nearly all the messages my server relays are not spam.

Looking through the rejected messages that have been returned by Gmail are requests for reservations, business deals mid-transaction, gmail customers looking for help using TrailsWeb's software.  All of them are unreachable because Gmail doesn't trust my server enough to allow anything through.

Looking around the web, many other postmasters are in the same boat.  Gmail has no system for addressing these kinds of events, nor do they indicate that any change will happen within any period of time.  They have a wonderful questionnaire that ultimately tells you to sit tight and it may change over time.  Meanwhile, I watch the $1000's add up in lost revenue for my customers that also use Gmail because their messages aren't getting through.

Perhaps tomorrow will be the day Gmail starts accepting messages from my server again... who knows?

Meanwhile, spam rates are at an all-time low for my inbox. :)

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