jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL
 ·AT&T Midwest
| SPAM Filter Quiz
In light of all the brouhaha around the Yahoo/AT&T Spam filtering and lots of people not getting legit mail along with a lot less Spam, I thought this quiz might be in order.
I'm the website admin for my kid's little league. We are affiliated with little league's competition, the Babe Ruth organization.
I have been in touch with the folks at their Internet entity, the baberuthnetwork.com about some issues. I KNEW they were sending me emails, but I wasn't getting them - not in my Outlook junk mail folder, not in my ATT Yahoo webmail Spam folder wither. Just not there, like a lot of legit email that seems to have been swallowed up by whatever ATT Yahoo is doing to filter Spam. When I switched to a Gmail address, everything arrived just fine.
Question: What was causing the incoming baberuthnetwork.com email to get whacked?
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lev
Premium,Ex-mod 2002-08
join:2001-05-30
Chicago, IL
clubs:  | Babe in the domain name. |
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jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL | A gold star and an extra bale of hay for the cow!
Sorry that you have decided to move off to other pastures - it's been great chewing cuds with you!
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Frohike
join:2000-07-23
Waxahachie, TX
| Here is how are system works at AT&T - 1st if we do not outright block the email - then we deliver it. Either to your inbox or spam folder.
We have quite a few criteria that must be met in order not be considered spam. If it fails just 1 of those - it gets sent to your spam folder. If it fails 2 or more or the IP the babe domain is sending from is on a Blacklist - we outright reject the email and block it back to them.
I would ask their admin to check their log history of when they connect to our email server and see if we accept or just block it back. If we block it - we give an error number with that explains why we blocked it. |
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jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL
·AT&T Midwest
| I'll do that. She told me that this is a common problem for them and there is nothing they can do about it - the "Babe" in their name is pretty much who they are.
From what she told me, it isn't just AT&T. She said AOL was worse.
Anyhow, if the problem is a blacklist, there isn't too much they can do (if I'm incorrect, please let me know), because beyond outfits like Spamhaus, it's very difficult to get off a blacklist when you are already on one, and in many cases they don't respond to requests, don't talk to you, and basically act as self-appointed judge and jury.
That said, which blacklisting outfits does AT&T use? Some (Spamhaus) are legit, others are as dodgy as the spammers themselves.
I'll put it this way: it's a huge pain to have to delete 100 or more spams form your inbox every day. It's worse to not get legit mail that was sent to you because of some innocuous word in the domain. Babe Ruth is not some porno babe, and unless ISPs and anti-spam outfits can get around the fairly stupid method of using keywords to decide what is spam, it isn't going to work very well. I mean, what happens when a urologist tries to talk about body parts in an email?
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lev
Premium,Ex-mod 2002-08
join:2001-05-30
Chicago, IL
clubs:
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to jsinaiko
It is possible to get Yahoo to whitelist something... eventually. The people at baberuthnetwork would have to be the ones to contact Yahoo via a form, the link to it should be at the bottom of »help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/p···-03.html
Yahoo will take a long time and much effort to resolve the problem. It took weeks a year ago.
866-557-1578 option 2 used to be a number to contact AT&T's mail department. It doesn't work for me, at least now, but if you want to try to find a way to contact them, they too can take it up with Yahoo from the other side. It'll still take weeks. |
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jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL
·AT&T Midwest
| Thanks - I'll let them know.
It's worth a try. Weeks is better than forever.
I bet littleleague.com doesn't have this problem!
Will you still be around to impart your knowledge to those of us with only one stomach? This sort of information is one of the things that make these forums so valuable.
Of course it is helpful to pros, but many of you are able to give out this sort of difficult-to-find information in normal-people language, and that's invaluable to the average user who wants to find something out.
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Frohike
join:2000-07-23
Waxahachie, TX
| reply to jsinaiko
It has nothing to do with the word Babe. And that number has been shutdown. It was being abused by customers. They knew it was direct line to Second Tier Support at AT&T and would use it to bypass First Tier.
I did reverse DNS lookup of the domain and found 1 issue that will cause us to reject the email. Let me paste and show you.
1st - I did nslookup on the mail domain to get the IP
E:\Documents and Settings\ADMIN>nslookup mail.baberuthnetwork.com
Server: dnsr1.sbcglobal.net
Address: 68.94.156.1
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: mail.baberuthnetwork.com
Address: 130.94.149.252 nslookup 130.94.149.252
Server: dnsr1.sbcglobal.net
Address: 68.94.156.1
Name: baberuthnetwork.com
Address: 130.94.149.252
Aliases: 252.149.94.130.in-addr.arpa ------ its not mail.baberuthnetwork.com
I'm not saying they are spammers - but AT&T has cut down alot of spam since impementing that restriction on email servers. Admins at that domain need to fix the reverse DNS so it goes back to their domain. |
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lev
Premium,Ex-mod 2002-08
join:2001-05-30
Chicago, IL
clubs: | reply to jsinaiko
Oh yeah, I'll still be around. Just not going to be putting the same time and energy into things.
As for Yahoo, I think AT&T should just finda better partner for mail. It's been degrading for a long time. |
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lev
Premium,Ex-mod 2002-08
join:2001-05-30
Chicago, IL
clubs:
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to Frohike
Are you saying the reverse DNS is wrong for that domain?
Because it's not.
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nslookup
> mail.baberuthnetwork.com
Server: 192.168.0.1
Address: 192.168.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: mail.baberuthnetwork.com
Address: 130.94.149.252
> 130.94.149.252
Server: 192.168.0.1
Address: 192.168.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
252.149.94.130.in-addr.arpa canonical name = 252.192-255.149.94.130.in-addr.arpa.
252.192-255.149.94.130.in-addr.arpa name = baberuthnetwork.com.
Authoritative answers can be found from:
192-255.149.94.130.in-addr.arpa nameserver = ns2.secure.net.
192-255.149.94.130.in-addr.arpa nameserver = ns1.secure.net.
ns2.secure.net internet address = 192.220.125.10
ns1.secure.net internet address = 192.220.124.10 |
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jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to Frohike
They are NOT spammers. They are a national nonprofit organization for youth baseball and softball. They don't send out mass emails ever. Just responses to queries for help, support, questions, etc.
That said, I'll let them know. Thanks.
ISPs need to understand that this is not just about technical issues; common sense needs to be exersized and the "throw the baby out with the bathwater" approach doesn't work either.
Yes, a lot of spam has been stopped. Hooray.
Now, don't the ISPs have a responsibility to tweak the systems to ensure that the real mail gets through too? The fact is, AT&T Yahoo has had email issues off and on for years now - the archives of this site and many others are filled with endless complaints about blockages, SMTP issues, time-outs, etc., etc. I understand that it is more on Yahoo's end than AT&T's, but we pay our bills to AT&T, not Yahoo, and that makes it AT&T's issue to deal with.
See Lev's comments above. And the Cow isn't known around here (as opposed to folks like me) for spouting off criticism lightly. The key words in his comment are "degrading" and "long time."
But it isn't your fault; thanks for the info - I certainly will pass it along. It might help.
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jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL | reply to lev
According to the Babe Ruth folks it is the keyword "babe" as you pointed out.
Looks like it isn't a DNS issue after all!
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NormanS
Premium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
·Pacific Bell - SBC
| reply to lev
said by lev  :It is possible to get Yahoo to whitelist something... eventually. Yahoo! shouldn't be involved in the blacklisting. The email should be hitting the domain gateway (MX) servers for the AT&T email domain first. That is where the block would be applied.
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Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum |
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NormanS
Premium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
·Pacific Bell - SBC
| reply to lev
said by lev :Are you saying the reverse DNS is wrong for that domain? No. What he is saying is that forward and reverse DNS do not match.
Forward lookup:
Reverse lookup:
Reverse on 130.94.149.252 should be, 'mail.baberuthnetwork.com'. That can be fixed in the DNS records for the domain.
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Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum |
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