209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP

Sun Sep 25 01:46:11 UTC 2005

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Omar Thameen" <omar at westside.urbanblight.com>
To: <nanog at nanog.org>
Cc: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <ops.lists at gmail.com>; "Alan Spicer" 
<a_spicer at bellsouth.net>
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 6:25 AM
Subject: Re: 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP

> On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 09:01:40AM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>>
>> On 20/09/05, Alan Spicer <a_spicer at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > I wonder if anyone with Bellsouth.net can tell me why this ip or /24
>> >
>> > 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24)
>> >
>> > would be blocked from sending SMTP to bellsouth.net customers.
>> >
>>
>> That's a large (and quite good) webhost called pair.com, which also
>> hosts the Pittsburgh IX (pitx.net)
>>
>> http://www.pair.com/support/notices/blocked-email.html
>>
>> Blocking is fine - happens.  Postmaster and other role accounts not
>> replying at all to email that they're sent is just not a good thing to
>> do.
>
> This may give you an idea of what issue may be and the response
> you're likely to encounter.
>
> Back in June, we contacted Bellsouth postmaster regarding their
> filtering of SMTP connections (i.e., so that connection attempts
> hang until the timeout is reached), and received this reply from
> postmaster at bellsouth.net:
>
> We will configure our settings for your company on our
> Filtering mechanism to 50 messages within a 5 minute window.
> We ask that you conform to this industry standards regarding
> submission of email to our mail server.
>
> As you all know, 50 messages/5 minutes is abysmally low, particularly
> for a mailing list hosting provider.  Our requests for higher
> threshold and a pointer to the "industry standards" were summarily
> dismissed.
>
> If there's a Bellsouth contact with more of a clue on this list,
> we'd be happy to meet any reasonable requirements you have for email
> delivery.
>
> Omar Thameen
> omar at BIGLIST.com
>

Bellsouth basically told me they were blocking Pair Networks because
the percentage of spam vs non-spam is around 75 - 80%. They say
they are communicating with them on this. Supposedly there was a
conference telephone call this past Thursday 09-22-2005. BS says
they must reduce this spam amount for the block to be removed.

Pair seems to think it is mostly domain customers forwarding their
mailboxes to their BS dot Net email accounts.

This the first I've heard of BS having a 50/5 threshold limit.

---
Alan Spicer (a_spicer at bellsouth.net) 