E-Mail Spoofing?

I normally use Gmail for all of my correspondance but had set up an account on one of my domains. On a whim I decided to check the address and found tens of thousands of sender failures. An hour later, I got a call from one of my clients who told me he'd been getting some spam complaints. I don't have any open relays but I'm not an e-mail security expert. My main worry is getting my server banned as a spam machine. I assume that the e-mail addresses are spoofed but my machine's IP is fine. Does anyone have any experience with this?

[charles]

Send the full headers to support and they can tell you if it's spoofed or not.

If it's not spoofed they should be able to tell you how it's happening as stop it.

If anything gets blocked, its the whole subnet, so we take this very seriously. Please submit a ticket ASAP.

charles

Will do Charles. The client who called me said she didn't have a single e-mail set up on that account.

Also check your IP on the spam blacklists periodically, using something like http://rbls.org or http://www.dnsstuff.com.

Originally Posted by smoore

Also check your IP on the spam blacklists periodically, using something like http://rbls.org or http://www.dnsstuff.com.

Yeah, my IP isn't there....

My IP is clean except for the blars.org blacklist dnsstuff checks against. It was on that one from day one so wasn't anything I did, and he blocks entire netblocks. But from what I can see, the Blars list is not widely used, and just an attempt at extortion.

[charles]

Blars is a joke

They all block entire netblocks, so you better believe were doing everything we can to keep them clear.

charles

AOL is becoming my nightmare! I thought I had it settled when I applied for the whitelist, which they approved, but still have 500 messages setting in queue that AOL/CS won't accept. From what I'm learning, it's not uncommon for AOL to just randomly block entire IP blocks. No rhyme or reason, just because they are AOL.

Make sure to enable Reverse DNS on your server(s) or AOL (and some other providers) won't accept the messages. They employ reverse-DNS checking to fight spam.

I'm having no problem with AOL delivery, also went through the whitelist process successfully. I do have reverse DNS setup, I also hear they absolutely require it. It also may help to ensure you have a valid SPF record in DNS.