[BC] Internet blackmail or stupidity? Barracuda users, especially, note!

[Barry Mishkind]

Does your company or ISP use "barracuda?"
Does your company lose a lot of incoming email?

Is there a solution?

As many of you know, there are spam problems with the Internet. Up to 98.5% of all email is bogus. Which creates a big problem.

Unfortunately, there are two major illnesses infecting IT people, and at least one of them has caused more than a few people to lose their incoming email from radiolists.net and/or the BDR.

First: the mentality: many IT people seem to believe that as long as no spam gets through, it doesn't matter if false positives kill off a lot of real email. It is "not their problem."

Barracuda is among the worst, apparently because it can so easily be set improperly.  I'll come back to that in a moment.

Meanwhile, some of the Internet filter sites are little more than money grabbing blackmailers. They list IP addresses - and then offer to unblock them for a fee.  Pretty sad.

This especially impacts those whose home or office service is from one of the major cable companies. All it takes is one of your neighbors (perhaps 1000 on a node!) to have sent spam, been invaded by a virus, or been reported as spam by an AOLer.  Then, the whole node is blacklisted. 

Worse, the way some companies have set up barracuda, it mangles the source of email with IP addresses, good and bad. I've seen bounce messages saying oldradio.com is 70.171.xxx.xxx .. even though that is a cox.net address.  Oldradio.com is 208.77.223.76  The Barracuda box is the problem.

Oldradio.com and children - radiolists.net and theBDR.net - are never listed in the RBL lists. However, for some reason, barracuda boxes often mix the domains with the originating IP addresses of posters on list email.  Some of you who get email from this list may find your email interrupted or broken for a while, because their barracuda boxes are mis-set as noted.

The result is bounced messages telling us that your email is an 'invalid mailbox" when it nothing of the sort. It is a stupid IT way of pushing the work on someone else to solve problems.

You may be assured that oldradio.com ... the server that is sending this list traffic (and the other domains) is clean.

It is quite possible that by whitelisting oldradio.com, radiolists.net, thebdr.net, and 208.77.223.76 you will solve email problems from these lists, but you might want to consider calling barracuda support to find out how many other domains are blocked from you on a partial or regular basis. 

Here's a worst case scenario, that I see almost every week:  A poster on a cable modem sends several posts to one of the lists, like BC.  Somewhere, a barracuda decides that poster's IP address is "bad" and blocks everything from the oldradio.com mail server. 

If this is happening to you, here's the heads-up.  You can be proactive and check on this - or you can wait until you miss some important email.

It blows my mind that this is such a big deal. And I've checked to see that oldradio.com is clean. But until enough people get annoyed at losing legitimate email, this will continue to be an intermittent problem.

Thanks for your attention.