SMTP Mail and Verizon

This morning I’m still trying to clean up my servers and I’ve run into another issue. Looks like Verizon is blocking all SMTP mail from one of my servers;

 host relay.verizon.net[206.46.232.11] refused
    to talk to me: 571 Email from 162.243.40.10 is currently blocked by Verizon
    Online's anti-spam system. The email sender or Email Service Provider may
    visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block.
    151214

Ok, it’s quite possible that someone on the discussion forums has been a misbehaving so I need to make sure there’s no legitimacy to this report. I need to scour the log files and make sure that there’s nothing going on. I keep the log files on my server for 30 days, let’s do some quick crude command line fu;

[root@moon ~]# grep -h @verizon /var/log/maillog* | awk '{ print $7 }' | sort | uniq -c
    427 to=nobody@verizon.net,

Note: I’ve obfuscated the email above so I don’t end up getting any more spam than I already receive daily.

Now that’s very interesting, I’m the only person that the server has been trying to mail which is getting denied by Verizon. Ok, so this problem is only impacting me, I guess that’s good.

So if it’s been going on for 30 days then I need to make sure the server is not listed on some RBL (real-time black list) somewhere. I’ll check http://www.blacklistalert.org/;

Alright so I wasn’t listed on any of the RBL, I looked through the logs for any other anomalies and found none, focusing again on mail for Verizon customers (verizon.net/verizon.com) and found nothing, I searched the discussion forums user database and blog comment subscriptions and found nothing. It must be a false positive on Verizon’s side, I’ll submit a request to Verizon following their instructions. I went to http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and I tried submitting a request as a Verizon customer and the form submission crashed with the following;

Ok, so I went back and submitted a request as an ISP (although I’m not an ISP but I’m starting to feel like one). That form was successfully submitted and I quickly received a reply via email.

That’s a boiler plate reply if I’ve ever seen one. Ok, so this doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy… I’ll need to chase the folks at abuse@verizon.net and probably in Twitter as well.

Cheers!