This might be construed as slighly off-topic and if so, my apology.

I discovered yesterday that we couldn't send email to one of our clients 
(very large client) and I called Ipswitch support (they were very 
helpful BTW) to try and resolve the problem.  Well, about 2 minutes into 
troubleshooting we discovered that our email was being rejected by our 
client's servers because our domain name ended up in a Spam abuse 
database!?  Sure enough, the SMTP Security options setting was set to 
allow everyone to relay mail.  Don't recall for the life of me how or 
when it got set to this option, but nonetheless, there it was.

I of course fixed that problem, and now I needed to find out where these 
databases exist (the support guy couldn't help me here).  After some 
searching I found a site (http://mail-abuse.org/referred.html) that 
spells out exactly what I needed to do to verify that our domain was in 
the database(s) (it was) and how to request it be removed (I did).  This 
is extremely frustrating and embarrasing because I'm (usually) on top of 
things like this, but this fell through the cracks obviously.  Now I 
have to wait for our client to update their database (could take 24-48 
hours I'm told) so we can send mail again.  Live and learn.

After all that, I *do* have a question.  How can I tell by looking at my 
log file that my server was indeed used for relay spamming?  The only 
other thing we can think of is that we sent unsolicited email to our 
current and former clients asking if they'd like to subscribe to our 
company newsletter.  Perhaps we really upset someone who reported us. 
Yes, we thought about the issue and risk of sending unsolicited email to 
current/former clients, but obviously not *all* the risks.

Regards,
Dale


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