Contact AUP team

[JulianMHall]

Hi All,

My IP address is blacklisted on Spamhaus (used by many including my local authority to vet emails). Undoubtedly Virgin's fault as the last time they alleged a device on /my/ system was sending spam it turned out to be /their/ webmail - which I never use as I have my own domain.

How do I contact the AUP team //directly//? I've tried making a complaint but all I got was a standard, totally irrelevant, reply.

Kind regards,

Julian

[用心棒]

It would be helpful to know on which of Spamhaus's blocklists does your network's public IP Address appear?

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[VMUser1812]

You know, I cant help but wonder if there actually is a 'AUP team’, or was it something that the call centre agent just made up?

[JulianMHall]

There had better be an AUP - Acceptable Use Policy, aka Abuse - team as I created it when I worked for VM's forerunner ntl: as a Senior Technical Support Agent. At the time complaints were dealt with by one person, and he left. I personally built up the AUP team, and I also trained their manager.

As for it being something the callcentre agent made up, wrong because the automated standard reply didn't even reference them or make any reference to my actual complaint. Thus I came here in the hope that actual human beings would know the answer. Incidentally the IP is lists on Spamhaus' PBL and explicitly state the ISP put it there, which is why I need them to remove it.

Kind regards,

Julian

[用心棒]

PBL can safely be ignored in most cases, read more below:

⋮
The Policy Block List

The Spamhaus PBL is a DNSBL database of end-user IP address ranges which should not be delivering unauthenticated SMTP email to any Internet mail server except those provided for specifically by an ISP for that customer's use. The PBL helps networks enforce their Acceptable Use Policy for dynamic and non-MTA customer IP ranges.

PBL IP address ranges are added and maintained by each network participating in the PBL project, working in conjunction with the Spamhaus PBL team, to help apply their outbound email policies.

Additional IP address ranges are added and maintained by the Spamhaus PBL Team, particularly for networks which are not participating themselves (either because the ISP/block owner does not know about, is proving difficult to contact, or because of language difficulties), and where spam received from those ranges, rDNS and server patterns are consistent with end-user IP space which typically contain high concentrations of "botnet zombies", a major source of spam. Once aware of them, the ISP/block owner can take over such records at any time to manage them further.

The PBL lists both dynamic and static IPs, any IP which by policy (whether the block owner's or -interim in its absence- Spamhaus' policy) should not be sending email directly to the MX servers of third parties.
⋮

[Source: The Spamhaus Project - PBL]

You mentioned the vetting of emails in your initial post, how is PBL causing an issue?

[JulianMHall]

Very easily. All organisations which use them to verify incoming email - such as my local authority - block all email originating at IP addresses or domains in their lists. That's why they exist. My public IP address is listed on Spamhaus' PBL, and it explicitly says to contact my ISP to get it removed. Contacting customer services, predictably, was no help, so I'm asking here how to contact the AUP Team as removing the block would be their job.

[用心棒]

Your email client sends its messages to your email account's server which then delivers it onward to the recipient's server. When accepting delivery the recipient's server check the delivery server's IP Address against the PBL, it does not check the IP Address of the network from which your email client sent the message; an organisation may query the latter IP Address against other Spamhaus lists, i,e. SBL, XBL

FYI read @ravenstar68's post Understanding Email Block Lists - Virgin Media Community - 3169662 section on Policy Block Lists (PBL).

[coenoby]

@JulianMHall 

Virgin Media IP address are all Dynamically allocated and should be on the PBL list. I know all the VM IP addresses I have ever had have been listed on it. 

If an IP address is on the PBL it just means that it should not be sending email direct to Mail Exchanger (MX) .

As far as your outgoing emails (using a VM or any other domain) are concerned, as long as you are sending your emails from an email webmail service or from an email app / client using SMTP authentication you will have no problems

On the other hand if your are hosting your own email server from a VM domestic broadband account the fact that your IP address is on the PBL could create problems for you.

As an aside, at the moment, I am accessing the forum via a Plusnet homebroad broadband network. I have just checked and, as I expected, that family's Plusnet IP address is also on the PBL.

Coenoby

[ravenstar68]

@JulianMHall Just toi co firm what others have said, being on the PBL is normal.

inbound mail servers use IP blacklists to vet the addresses they are connecting to, NOT where the mail originally came from.  This is a regular misconception.  VM do use one blacklist themselves in a non standard way, the CSS (composite snowshoe) blacklist, but this is the only one that most senders should be concerned about.

Tim

[JulianMHall]

'Virgin Media IP address are all Dynamically allocated and should be on the PBL list.' Completely wrong. No IP addresses should be on the PBL unless they are the source of abuse. That's the whole point of them.. it's a Block List and you don't block an IP that hasn't caused a problem.

'As far as your outgoing emails (using a VM or any other domain) are concerned, as long as you are sending your emails from an email webmail service or from an email app / client using SMTP authentication you will have no problems'. Again wrong. I wouldn't be posting here if they weren't causing problems.