Have I Been Blacklisted?

[BobH]

One of my long-time friends (65 years) and email correspondents no longer receives my emails and I get this message back (using Thunderbird 17.0.8):

blacklisted.jpg

I blurred what appeared to me to be identifying information to protect everyone's privacy.

I looked up bl.nszones.com and it appears to be a place where one can block IP addresses; however the IP addresses I blurred out are not those I find with ipconfig on my system.

Have I been blacklisted by my friend? How does one interpret this message?

[HansV]

Perhaps your ISP has been blacklisted?

[BobH]

Perhaps your ISP has been blacklisted?

If that were so, wouldn't ALL my emails be undelivered? I send to, and get responses from, several dozen people through the one and only ISP I use.

[stuck]

I may be wrong but won't ipconfig just tell you the IP addresses on your network? What I mean is I don't think it will tell you the IP address assigned to your router by your ISP. Please can a real network expert clarify this.

Meanwhile consider too that, if your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address then it's possible you've been given one that was misused in the past and hence blacklisted. If you restart your router your ISP may give you a new IP address. Again, please can someone who actually knows this sort of stuff correct me if I'm spouting nonsense.

Ken

[BobH]

Howdy, Ken!

I thought that the 'ping' command would reveal all - and it might - but one would have to know more about how to use it than I do.

So, I did a search and found the program PingPlotter, downloaded, installed and ran it and got this:

pingplotter.jpg

Again, I blurred out the IP addresses; but I asked it to trace the IP address that was identified in the Mail Delivery Failure message as having been blacklisted. Sure enough, the routing started with the IP address of my router and it appears that each mail server assigned a different IP address ending up with the one identified as being blacklisted.

IOW, referring to the pic . . .
Hop 1 is my router address.
Hop 2 is indecipherable to me having a value of "100" and nothing more
Hop 3 appears to be either my ISP or the place my ISP sent the ping
Hops 4 through 10 also appear to be mail server routing (Domain Name Servers/DNS) points
Hop 11 is the final destination which I believe to be the DNS server routing to my addressee.
Here it shows the IP address shown in the Mail Delivery Failure message indicating that it blacklisted that IP address.

There is a great deal I don't know about packet switching and Internet Protocol (IP) including how aliasing and IP address randomization occur. For example; how does the reverse routing pair IP addresses in order to be able to work the chain backwards. So, I shall investigate further and - if I learn more (doubtful) - share it here.

[StuartR]

My guess is that your ISP's mail server has been blacklisted by your friends ISP. Can you use WHOIS to look up the IP address that you have obscured, just to check that it is your ISP's mail server.

[viking33]

BobH,
Is this a European or more specifically an Italian ISP address? It sounds hauntingly like the problem I had ( have ) with my BIL who lives in Turin, Italy. It seems that his ISP is on someone's blacklist, maybe the NSA or Verizon???? who knows? At any rate any mail from him to me using my Verizon address is blocked. This is ONLY from his ISP. All other mail works fine. I went through all kinds of things trying to clear it up but never succeeded. The only way to get his mail is through is to have him send it to my Gmail account and I have Gmail set to forward them to my regular Verizon address. My not be the same thing but it is similar or so it sounds.

[Jay Freedman]

Perhaps your ISP has been blacklisted?

If that were so, wouldn't ALL my emails be undelivered? I send to, and get responses from, several dozen people through the one and only ISP I use.

To clear up this point: Each individual *receiving* ISP/mail server has the option to subscribe to one or more blacklists. It appears your friend's ISP's mail server subscribes to the bl.nszones.com blacklist, but probably no other servers to which you've sent email subscribe to that blacklist.

Many blacklists have terrible reputations, because they allow almost anyone to accuse a server (in this case, your ISP) of allowing spam or other undesirable behavior. They rarely bother to investigate the truth of these accusations, and some of them make it very hard to remove an ISP from the list. In other words, they behave a lot like EBay.

You might send email to your ISP's webmaster, including the text of the refusal, and ask them to wrestle with nszones.com.

[BobH]

Perhaps your ISP has been blacklisted?

If that were so, wouldn't ALL my emails be undelivered? I send to, and get responses from, several dozen people through the one and only ISP I use.

To clear up this point: Each individual *receiving* ISP/mail server has the option to subscribe to one or more blacklists. It appears your friend's ISP's mail server subscribes to the bl.nszones.com blacklist, but probably no other servers to which you've sent email subscribe to that blacklist.

Many blacklists have terrible reputations, because they allow almost anyone to accuse a server (in this case, your ISP) of allowing spam or other undesirable behavior. They rarely bother to investigate the truth of these accusations, and some of them make it very hard to remove an ISP from the list. In other words, they behave a lot like EBay.

You might send email to your ISP's webmaster, including the text of the refusal, and ask them to wrestle with nszones.com.

Thanks, Jay!

I have been on the phone with my ISP (RoadRunner) this afternoon and been assured that I am not blacklisted on any of their servers. What I've had trouble figuring out is how the bl.nszones.com database is accessed - and by whom - in the email delivery cycle. From what I've determined using whois data, all of the nodes, or hops, or DNS servers, are operated by RoadRunner/TWC. I was told by the RR/TWC CSR that their organization does not link to the blacklist site. I do not know if the email recipient uses an ISP that links to the blacklist, but I suspect that has happened.

From my conversation with the RR technician, the relevant IP address that is blocked by the blacklist organization seems to be one assigned to a RR/TWC DNS server (although I am unable to confirm that at present). I cannot imagine that a blacklisting agency could or would deny forwarding from a RR/TWC DNS server unless there is an undiscovered problem.

I have submitted a request to bl.nszones.com through their website Contact Us facility. I explained the problem as best I could and asked to be informed if the listing were directed at my IP address (and dynamic IP addressing is in use yet the problem is consistent over time and different messages) or if there were a technical glitch. I even pointed out to them that the black listed IP address appears to be one assigned to a RR/TWC server. It will be interesting to see what develops from that contact.

I've not been able to reach my correspondent by phone yet to ask if they might have blacklisted my email.

Again, thanks for your input. If nothing else, this old retired IT puke who designed and built networks in the 70s has had his little gray cells stimulated today.

[Argus]

Just a small comment on the nomenclature, if I may. As we know, an ISP isn't necessarily also an e-mail service provider, but I guess most of them provide that, and many people have several accounts; at the ISP, and companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo etc. That's why I sometimes use the term ESP, e-mail service provider. Though in this case it seems to be an account at your ISP.

I don't know much about this; but I can't see what name servers (DNS) got to do with it; it seems like some MTA or MSA (mail transfer agent, mail submission agent) has been blacklisted, or rather the computer running said software; as mentioned by Stuart.
(It's those adding a "Received" in the Header of the message, a long the path to the ESP's mail delivery agent (MDA), before it ends up in the "inbox".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_transfer_agent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_submission_agent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hope you get it solved.

[BobH]

Thank you, Argus!

As I noted, my education in this area is woefully lacking. I probably made some far-fetched associations in using the term DNS and assuming that email addresses must be, somehow, parsed to get the domain in order to know the routing.

Seventy-one years and still learning.

[BobH]

My emails are now (mysteriously) getting to my intended correspondent.

I sent a contact message to the blacklisting organization and never got a response. I also (finally) finagled the email address of someone at RR/TWC whose job it is to ensure the channels remain clear. I sent that address all of the details but I've never heard back from them; however the problem was resolved in mere hours.

I got the email address from a TWC Support Chat. Apparently none of the front line techs have tools (or the knowledge, perhaps) to respond to problems like the one I encountered; but if you are persistent and get to someone who is willing to escalate, you can succeed.

Not to be xenophobic, but I've found that the techs on phone support from the Asian subcontinent are rarely helpful and rarely willing to escalate for you. It almost seems that they are penalized if they don't handle the call themselves when the real goal should be to make the customer happy whatever it takes (within reason, of course).

[stuck]

Not to be xenophobic, but I've found that ... support from the Asian subcontinent are rarely helpful...

I go out of my way to make sure services I buy have UK based call centres, even if that costs more. I don't seem to be alone in this either as I've heard reports that many UK business are bring their customer care lines back to the UK.

Ken