Spam Emails

MartynK

Not so much of a question but more an issue, it seems emails from fing.com are getting marked as spam as the aws email server 54.240.6.45 that emails are being sent from is listed in the SORBS database as a send of spam.
I have tried all sorts of things to get around the issue, but far short of having my SMTP server ignore all RBL lookups, there is not a lot I can do.
Anyone have any ideas ?

kltaylor

Hi @MartynK welcome to the community and thanks for asking your question.

Depending on what email client you're using, you should look into adding the Fing emails to the Whitelist.  If that doesn't solve the issue then whomever is your email server provider will need to check to see if fing.com is added to their Spam list and if they can remove it.

MartynK

Let me explain a little more.
A lot of SMTP servers use RBL lists to fight against Spam, these lists are open to anyone to use and work on people reporting spam and the servers that send them. So the domain @fing.com is using what looks like Amazon Web Services to host its email, its the AWS server that is blacklisted, so as soon as it sends email, its IP is checked against SORBS (in this case) and its listed there. Because its listed there, the mail server automatically marks the email as spam and places it in to the spam folder.
So this all happens before the email even hits the email client.

Robin

Hi @MartynK
To update, Fing do use AWS cloud servers for its functionality. You may need to whitelist in order to obtain the Fing emails.

MartynK

Robin said:

Hi @MartynK
To update, Fing do use AWS cloud servers for its functionality. You may need to whitelist in order to obtain the Fing emails.

Hi,
You cannot whitelist when SORBS or any other system blacklists you like this.

The problem you have its its IP based not domain based, so unless I whitelist every IP for AWS as I dont know where the @fing.com emails are coming from, so I am stuck.

I have spent many a year working on email servers and the only way around this it to get the agreement that the email comes from a clean IP.

Whitelisting AWS just means I have to accept email from every IP they have and also keep updating my email servers for any new IPs they add, not really that pratical.

The way email should work is the sender should always ensure that their sending MX is clean, have a good reputation and things like PTR records.

MartynK

Robin said:

Hi @MartynK
To update, Fing do use AWS cloud servers for its functionality. You may need to whitelist in order to obtain the Fing emails.

So, I have gone deeper in to this ad as I expected, the emails are not getting sent from @fing.com
When I look at the email envelope, the email in my example came from:
X-Envelope-Sender: [email protected]west-1.amazonses.com
Which as you can see, is not really something that can be whitelisted if its going to change.
Its only the "From:" in the envelope and headers that is from @fing.com as below
From: Fing Alert <[email protected]> 
Email clients as a general rule dont white list on the "From:" address as that is easily spoofed.
So the question is, how do we get around this, fine alerts need to get delivered cleanly, but thats never going to happen if they are being sent from a blacklisted source.