The Woes of Blacklisted E-mail Servers

I require more facepalms.

A client uses a dirt cheap spam filter that costs $5 a month for the ENTIRE account. It’s called SpamHero. Insert obvious joke of SpamZero.

It’s worth less than what they pay.

Seriously, goddamnit, downgrading from a Barracuda appliance to this is like being a captain of a Sovereign class starship and downgrading to a Miranda class. What the fuck, seriously.

Here’s the worst part: it wasn’t the client’s choice to use SpamZero. They were hosted on my old MSP’s Barracuda. Guess why my MSP got them to switch? THEY DIDN’T WANT TO PAY FOR THE BARRACUDA’S ENERGIZER UPDATES.

So they got SpamZero, passed on the $5 per month to their clients, and the owner’s laughing all the way to the bank while his techs have to deal with the piece of shit he shat on them. This thing frequently breaks and wrecks client’s e-mail services, but that is not the reason why I am ranting about it.

I’m ranting about it because they appear to have only two outbound servers.

Two.

Which means when some douchebag/hacked tenant gets one of the two servers blacklisted…

Yeah, our clients were only receiving half their e-mails. Their e-mail host (not us or Office 365), which is also a piece of shit, blocked one of the spam filter’s two relays.

Fantastic.

SpamZero tells us “they’re escalating the issue.”

The e-mail host says they’re blocked due to being blacklisted. The offshore call center refuses to do anything about it.

So…we have to wait for Spam Zero to contact the e-mail host? And there’s no ETA?

What the fuck?

And because my old MSP is cheap as fuck, the options are limited. They don’t have a datacenter worth shit to set up an SMTP relay. They don’t want to pay for their Barracuda. They’re gonna just let the client roll without spam filtering for who knows how long, so brilliant!

To be fair, it’s not completely their fault, and $5/month for an entire domain is pretty cheap when the spam filtering works. But they could have just rotated our client’s outbound server or something. Instead, our ticket was stuck in escalation on Friday, no response over the weekend of course…