Thanks Laura and Chris for your replies, and sorry if I wasn't as precise in my language as perhaps I should have been. I've been in the email business since 2005 and have been impressed with the general high experience level of the posters on this list. I didn't think I needed to be as specific as I think you wanted me to be -- especially because I was asking for guidance regarding an optimal MTA IP "warm up" process, and just using my case as an example of what happens when that process (if one exists) is not apparently followed.
1) So to be clear, none of my nor my customers' domains are on blocklists presently (nor were they at the time ~2 months ago), nor were/are any of my MTA's IPs on any public block lists. 2) The IP address of the new MTA we attempted to put into limited production was placed on the internal block lists of Microsoft, Google and Mimecast (which I resell) the same weekend we put that new MTA into limited production. Test emails we had sent prior to the production weekend to those and other service providers all sailed through OK. The outbound email we fed through the new MTA that weekend was a simply portion of the normal outbound email we process through our existing MTAs. All of the email processed through our existing MTAs that weekend was delivered successfully. 3) Microsoft's response was that this IP was not eligible for remediation. I presumed, since none of the bounce messages in the logs indicated anything regarding email contents, nor anything related to the sending domains, that this was due to the IP being "new". So that was why I titled this thread "MTA Server IP "Warm Up" Reputation Recommended Best Practices". We have other IPs we can use if needed, so again, I am less concerned about improving this IP's reputation than I am with not repeating this outcome. No one has yet indicated a better process for warming up an IP than essentially "send some email" -- that's not something we can do with our customers' production email flows. So if we need first to set up a separate domain or two, and open a raft of Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook.com accounts as destinations to create a reputation for an IP where we can afford to have these emails blocked, and; then deal with any bounce messages etc., OK. That process seems... sub-optimal at best. If anyone has a better process for warming up sending MTA IPs, I would be grateful. With best regards to all, Mark ___________________________________________ L. Mark Stone, Founder Mission Critical Email LLC ----- Original Message ----- From: "mailop" <mailop@mailop.org> To: "mailop" <mailop@mailop.org> Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2020 1:31:03 PM Subject: Re: [mailop] MTA Server IP "Warm Up" Reputation Recommended Best Practices On 2020-09-03 10:41, Laura Atkins via mailop wrote: > What “other block lists” are you on? Knowing that may help identify what > you did wrong. It’s unusual for IPs to be blocked outright after 3 days > of mail. What were you sending and to whom were you sending it? Who owns > the IP? Where is it routed from? How did you acquire the IP address? Is > it being routed? .... > This is one of those questions that’s very difficult to actually answer > in the hypothetical. Precisely. We've seen this scenario many times before, new sending IP, and seems to get listed right away even tho the volumes are kept low at first. By not paying attention/investigating other listings, you might not notice the fact that you made a glaring configuration error that spells "infected!!!!!" to not just DNSBLs, but generalized inbox filtering as well. But the person thinks it's to do with "new IP", rather than "new IP with obvious problems". We see it all the time, and it's impossible to answer in the hypothetical. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
