Occasional email outages

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Grumpy Monday-morning rant from Jed. Please disregard. Partly just the product of too little sleep.

There are at least two sites on the web (and I assume there are others as well) that maintain databases of sites believed to be spam generators.

For example, one such site (the ORDB) has a database of "open relays"—mail servers that will accept email from anyone and pass it along to anyone. Open relays are great for spammers; if you're a spammer, you can connect to an open relay and send all your spam, whereas a respectable ISP might prevent you from doing that.

So the open-relay database sites are doing a public service. They provide a list of open relays, and ISPs can use that list to bounce all mail that comes from an open relay. Presumably the owner of the open relay eventually figures out (via "my mail is bouncing" complaints from irate users) that there's a problem, and takes steps to stop the relay from being open.

There's one big problem with this: false positives. Three times now, Pair (my web host and email service provider) has been falsely listed on spammer databases because of Pair customers mistakenly believing Pair has a problem, which causes all mail originating from certain Pair machines to bounce when directed to ISPs that rely on the spammer databases to block spam. For example, yesterday Pair's relay got listed at the ORDB, which meant that a followup email I sent to an author bounced. I had absolutely no way to contact this author until the ORDB happened to get around to delisting Pair. (I could use papermail, but that would be a big pain.)

So why, you might ask, did the ORDB list Pair as an open relay in the first place? According to Pair, a Pair customer noticed that they could send mail through relay.pair.com, and reported it to the ORDB.

In case it's not clear, Pair customers are supposed to be able to send mail through relay.pair.com. That's exactly why relay.pair.com exists. People who aren't Pair customers can't send mail through it.

Fortunately, the listing has been removed, and all should be fine now. But it's yet another thing you should be aware of if you're expecting mail from me at any given time: I have no control over Pair customers reporting their own mail service provider as a spammer because they don't understand what's going on. (The previous two times, unrelated to open relays, a Pair customer whose mail is forwarded through Pair to another address thought that the spam that was being forwarded to them was originating at Pair, so they reported Pair to spamcop, a blacklist site. Grr.) So sometimes I'll be completely unable to send mail to certain places.

(This morning I came up with a couple of alternative approaches; for example, I could have asked Susan to send the mail, and I probably could've sent it in a way that didn't use relay.pair.com. But see above about big pains.)

This sort of thing is why I don't like systems that silently dispose of messages they consider spam. If there's no human oversight, chances are good that there will be false positives. (Even if there is a human involved, of course, there are bound to be false positives; but I'm a lot more comfortable relying on my own sense of what constitutes spam than letting a software filter decide for me. Or rather, the software filter makes a first-pass approximation, but then I look over the results to be sure it was right, rather than just throwing away anything the software considers spam.)

6 Responses to “Occasional email outages”

  1. Nick Mamatas

    There’s a debate among the Marxian economists about planning. Democrats look towards real-world examples of democratic planning, technocrats look towards developing computer technology.

    Democrats (like me) are fond of pointing out that even the least flexible and reactionary Politburo thug bureaucrat is infinitely more flexible than the most flexible computer program.

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  2. Rachel

    When I was working at Unilab (recently bought out by Quest Diagnostics; at the time, it was the largest independent medical lab in California), Earthlink decided that the Unilab servers were an open relay and refused to accept anything from our domain.

    What a mess.

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  3. Michael Sykes

    Wow – my comment is way out of date, but searching for “relay.pair.com” today you were the first hit (after Pair). Anyways, if 4 years later you are stil having such problems, you can send mail via their web interface – webmail.pair.com. It doesn’t solve the initial problem of the spam-listed emails, but it lets you workaround things on a temporary basis.

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  4. Jed

    Thanks for the note, Michael! Back in those days, I didn’t know about the webmail interface, but yeah, these days I use it regularly. For the particular issue I was describing in this entry, webmail would be non-ideal, because a lot of my recordkeeping involves keeping copies of sent messages in Eudora (and I use POP rather than IMAP in Eudora); also, I like to send mail to authors using my strangehorizons.com return address, and I don’t think there’s a way in the webmail interface to specify a different return address. But yeah, it would be an option. And these days I also have other emergency options, like using gmail. And the Pair-being-blacklisted problem hasn’t recurred in years.

    But I do appreciate the note, especially ’cause I had no idea this entry ranked so highly for searches on the term [relay.pair.com]; and I imagine that others who run into problems sending via relay.pair.com may also appreciate your suggested workaround.

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  5. Kit

    relay.pair.com is only to be used by Pair customers if they don’t have an ISP outgoing mail service they can use. If you have internet access then chances are good that you have access to your ISP’s outgoing mail server. Use it. This is clearly listed in Pair’s customer agreement and FAQ section.

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  6. Jed

    Specifically, what Pair’s document about their SMTP service says is that you can use relay.pair.com only under certain circumstances.

    One of those circumstances is: “Your Internet Service Provider’s mailserver is unsuitable for technical reasons.”

    Last I checked, my ISP’s SMTP server was, in fact, unsuitable for technical reasons. For example, I don’t think they’ll let me set the address on my From line, which is something I need to do (for very legitimate reasons) all the time.

    So I’ve been using relay.pair.com for SMTP for years (note that I posted this entry five years ago), and nobody at Pair has ever objected to my doing so.

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