Today, an email to one of our writers bounced. The message said that the IP address for the site or for me, probably both, has been identified as a source of spam, so it was blocked.
Okay. This has happened before. You see, right wingers who want to sabotage OpEdNEws lie and say they were spammed. If they use two or three different email addresses, they can single-handedly shut down email to a given site. We're also having problems with hotmail, where our emails are put into spam filters and/or identified as dangerous.
So I go through the paces of filling out a form asking them to unblock us.
I get an email back telling me to email an administrator.
The damned email bounces.
That means people using excite email can't get messages from OpEdNEws.
If you're an excite user, please contact excite and tell them about this article. Better yet, copy the whole article. Send it to them. Tell them I said their system is very broken.
This is the mail system at host mail.help.iwon.com.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The mail system
<xmailadmin@help.iwon.com> (expanded from <mailadmin@cs.excite.com>): unknown
user: "xmailadmin"
Final-Recipient: rfc822; xmailadmin@help.iwon.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822;mailadmin@cs.excite.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; unknown user: "xmailadmin"
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Robert Kall" <rob@opednews.com>
To: mailadmin@cs.excite.com
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:40:19 -0500
Subject: Fwd: Excite Bounce Message Reports [Incident:080219-002689]
please read my message, included below the response.
rob kall
Editor in Chief, opednews.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Excite Customer Service <excite@mailca.custhelp.com>
Date: Feb 19, 2008 4:28 PM
Subject: Excite Bounce Message Reports [Incident:080219-002689]
To: rob@opednews.com
Response
Discussion Thread Customer 02/19/2008 04:28 PM OpEdNews is a liberal political media site. We have 12,000 double opt in subscribers to our daily e-newsletter, and we saw 600,000 unique visitors last month. Some of them are conservatives who attempt to sabotage us by reporting that we engage in spamming. This is not true. We ARE a high traffic site. We do, like most media, offer a "tell-a-friend" function that lets people send links to articls to other people. But we are very careful to prevent spamming, including using optical text entry to enable sign up, or to send emails.
If you block us, you are being duped by people who want to shut us down. We are legitimate members of the media, publishing 300-400 original articles a month.
If there is something we need to do to prove that we are not spammers, we will be happy to cooperate.
Here's the message we received.
SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<voiceforpeace@excite.com>:
host xmxatip.excite.com [207.159.120.164]: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [66.135.48.28] blocked using blackholes.excite.com; Sender address rejected:
Access denied Error: WS-19
Inforob kall
Member Name Entered: voiceforpeace@excite.com
Member Name:
User Number:
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Num: 68.80.230.225
Email Address: rob@opednews.com
Time: Tue Feb 19 16:16:24 EST 2008Question Reference #080219-002689
Product Level 1: Bounced Email Issue Date Created: 02/19/2008 04:28 PM Last Updated: 02/19/2008 04:28 PM Status: Solved
