I woke up one morning and got an email from a project manager. The original email from a client had a returned email with the following email server response:
We were black listed. So I went to their removal page, entered my IP address and waited. Later that day I get an email from them:
as static or dynamic. Upon checking, here is the rDNS:
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (ec2-1xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com)
You will need to work with your ISP to correctly define the IP, then ask them to contact us at
dul@mail-abuse.com
Then we can work with the ISP to resolve the issue and remove your IP.
They put the responsibility on Amazon to get the IP address de-listed, since they owned it. So after doing much research I found that this same problem had happened with SpamHaus. Since so many spammers are also taking advantage of the cloud, top SPAM black lists were just blocking entire Amazon IP blocks. Not taking into considering the hundreds or thousands of valid Amazon Web Services customers sending email legitimately.
I can understand that spammers are a problem and that black lists have value in the SPAM game. However I viewed this as an attack on cloud computing. Everyone I talked to about the situation from TrendMicro to SAP IT in Germany all said the same thing. Why don’t you just use a real infrastructure that isn’t in the cloud. They just dismissed the cloud as the problem.
Trend Micro decided to just list the entire Amazon blocks rather than listing individual offenders.
So I needed to just wait for Amazon to do something or Trend Micro MAPS. So I just started lobbying both sides. Heavily!
They both pointed the finger at the other side. I escalated my ticket with Amazon Web Services and emailed Trend Micro MAPS on a daily basis asking them to not hold our business hostage any more.
Then I got a response on my Amazon Web Services support ticket one day about reverse DNS on our IP addresses.
Email in the Amazon Cloud – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Guide to Email in the Amazon Cloud
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Tags: Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing, Internet service provider, IP address, Spam, The Spamhaus Project, Trend Micro
[...] in November we encountered Trend Micro MAPS. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Cloud Computing, [...]
We experienced the same problem with our corporate mail server, which is hosted within Amazon EC2. I can’t tell you the number of times we have had to switch from sending directly from Amazon, to sending through a dedicated VPS account (which has a static IP address), and then back to Amazon on account of the VPS IP space being blocked.
The long term solution to this problem is for Amazon to do a better job of preventing spammers from abusing their IP space. Trend, Spamhaus, and other blacklists are just doing their job – listing Amazon’s IP space so that their users will get less spam.
Ironically my company sells an outbound spam filtering solution called “MailChannels Outbound”. And yes, we are trying to reach the right people at Amazon so that they can hopefully fix this problem by stopping spammers on their network.