TAPCIS.COM Email Bounced Messages

[Guerri Stevens]

I play the Dixonary game by having the Coryphaeus Yahoo group automatically send its messages to me at my tapcis.com Email address. Tonight when I logged on there were no messages, which I thought was a bit odd. I did get a message from Yahoo though, telling me that my Email address (at tapcis.com) was bouncing Emails, and subsequently I found out that Yahoo had de-activated the sending of messages to my Email and would not allow me to post messages directly in the group. I got that straightened out.

However, I don't understand about the bounced messages. I have been getting Email all along. And Yahoo's own bounced message report shows only a few messages being bounced, although why there should be any is beyond me.

The bounced message report does show information about the most recent bounced message, and here it is in case anyone can make any sense out of it:

Remote host said: 553 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=216.155.201.59 [RCPT_TO]

[Guerri Stevens]

I went to the link in my previous message and got this:

216.155.201.59 is not listed in the SBL

216.155.201.59 is not listed in the XBL




If the IP you are checking is not in our database, but you are receiving bounce messages saying it is, then it is probable the IP has been removed from our database but DNS servers around the internet have not yet updated. In this case, wait 1-2 hours and the blocking should clear by itself.

This tool is for manual (non-automated) lookups only. Any perceived use of automated tools to access this system will result in firewalling or other countermeasures.

[Lindsey]

"SBL" is the Spamhaus Block List (http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/index.lasso). The XBL is the Spamhaus Exploits Block List (http://www.spamhaus.org/xbl/). The message you quote means just what it said: the IP address from which those messages were sent had been included at one time in one or both lists, but was later removed, presumably because whatever algorithm Spamhaus uses had determined that the spam threat was over.

The tapcis.com mail processor is apparently using the Spamhaus black lists to determine what is and is not spam and is bouncing it.

More than that I cannot tell you, because I frankly don't know anything about the tapcis.com e-mail setup. I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until Judy can address it, which will not be for some days yet. In the meantime, do you have another address that you can use for the Dixonary mailings?

--Lindsey

[Guerri Stevens]

To make sure I understand what's going on: tapcis.com is doing the bouncing based on this list at Spamhaus? I don't know of any other bounced messages, other than those from the Dixonary game. So based on that knowledge, it appears that from time to time the Yahoo group used by the game is being identified as a spammer????

There was at least one other player in the most recent round who also got a message from Yahoo about bounced messages, and she is not using tapcis.com. There are other players who didn't receive messages during a recent round, and from time to time there are complaints that messages have not been received. It has always seemed random and we've never had a reasonable theory about what's happening. Now I wonder if all the missed messages are due to temporary bounces?

The Yahoo group actually de-activated Email deliveries for me. I don't know how it comes to the decision to do that since its bounce report for me showed a total of 59 bounces since I've been playing via Email from the group. It deactivated me between the evening of the 6th and the evening of the 7th. I have now gotten myself reactivated. But it's odd that this would happen now, and not due to any of the other bounced messages. Could be just a timing coincidence, I guess.

[Lindsey]

To make sure I understand what's going on: tapcis.com is doing the bouncing based on this list at Spamhaus?
I don't know; that's only my guess based on what portion of the message you posted here. There's not enough there to know for sure.

So based on that knowledge, it appears that from time to time the Yahoo group used by the game is being identified as a spammer????
I don't know what knowledge you are referring to, but it's not the group that Spamhaus has identified as the source of spam, but the mail server being used for at least some of those messages.

There was at least one other player in the most recent round who also got a message from Yahoo about bounced messages, and she is not using tapcis.com.
The Spamhaus blacklists are quite commonly used.

The Yahoo group actually de-activated Email deliveries for me. I don't know how it comes to the decision to do that
That's quite commonly done by mailing list operations when bounces are received from addresses on the list. You'd have to ask someone more familiar with this particular mailing list operation how it decides which addresses to deactivate. But yes, it could be a matter of crossing a threshold within a particular space of time.

--Lindsey

[Guerri Stevens]

Lindsey, I'm replying to you, but I suspect Judy is the one who can do something about this. A suggestion I received from one of the Dixonary players is to identify the Yahoo group as a "friend" or place it on a whitelist. I don't know how this all works, though, and since the message is identifying the IP address, the use of a whitelist or friends list may not work.

I got deactivated again, as did the other player who was affected before. That's twice in 48 hours. I would hate to have to give up my tapcis.com Email address so I hope it doesn't come to that.

Maybe I should try to complain to Yahoo directly.

[Gary Maltzen]

216.155.201.29 is n6.bullet.dcn.yahoo.com
I ran into an issue receiving legit mail as some of the Yahoo servers were recently black-listed by abuseat.org

Client host [216.155.201.66] blocked using cbl.abuseat.org;
Blocked - see http://cbl.abuseat.org/lookup.cgi?ip=216.155.201.66;
from=<calendar-remind@reply.yahoo.com> to=<*****> proto=SMTP helo=<n1.bullet.dcn.yahoo.com>

[Guerri Stevens]

I guess I will have to wait and see if it happens again. Based on my experience, that will be tomorrow (sigh).

[davidh]

Guerri,

This probably does not apply to your case and probably wouldn't help even if it did apply, but it might help in future.

I have found that if email is forwarded or relayed or whatever you might call it, on its way to you, that the more links in the chain, the more likely that some spam blocker might classify it as spam. Anyway, this is how I interpreted a case with yahoogroups where daily digests seemed NOT to be blocked, but individual emails sometimes were blocked. The key difference seemed to be that the digests came "directly" from the yahoo server. OTOH, the individual messages apparently had an additional step in the relaying, that is, in the "trip" from the message poster to the yahoogroups server.

Another way to "get" yahoo groups messages, at least in "public" groups, is to use RSS. Firefox browser, Thunderbird email, some web portals (personal "home" pages), some freeware RSS aggregators, Gush [sp?] freeware jabber protocol and multiprotocol (AIM, Yahoo, MSN) IM client, etc. support RSS. The disadvantage is that you may only get a subject line and a link to the message(s).

David H.

[davidh]

I checked and coryphaeus DOES support RSS. It's pretty easy to use RSS in Firefox. If you do use it, you could move the "live" bookmark for coryphaeus up to the top of your Firefox bookmark file to make it easier to see the list of the links to the
last 15 or so messages on Coryphaeus (with subject lines).

[Guerri Stevens]

I am not going to go the RSS route just yet. There have been 3 successive days with no deactivation (crossing fingers here) so maybe it's safe to get the Emails now. What is interesting is that one other player experienced the same problem as I did and it turns out that her Email is also "hosted" by Go Daddy, as is tapcis.com Email.

[Judy G. Russell]

Guerri, you might try adding the group email address to your whitelist. From the main email page, click on the Spam Settings tab, type (or better yet copy and paste) the email address into the box that says Add New Address, make sure whitelist shows up in the dropdown box then click on Add. Theoretically at least your own personal filters should override anything Godaddy is using and they do override general spam settings.

[Guerri Stevens]

Guerri, you might try adding the group email address to your whitelist. From the main email page, click on the Spam Settings tab, type (or better yet copy and paste) the email address into the box that says Add New Address, make sure whitelist shows up in the dropdown box then click on Add. Theoretically at least your own personal filters should override anything Godaddy is using and they do override general spam settings.

I added the group's Email address to my whitelist (well, I didn't have anything in the whitelist before). I am not sure that will work, but it's worth a try.

I noticed that I had spam filtering turned OFF, and decided to leave it that way for now. The comments on the page say that the white and black lists are used regardless of the spam filter setting. Which makes me wonder whether the Spamhaus report is also used regardless of the filter setting.

[Judy G. Russell]

It's entirely possible that it is used regardless of the filter setting, but at least the filter setting can't hurt anything.