Quote:
Originally Posted by garland
Interesting problem. It is as others mentioned normal for a residential IP to be on RBLs. In fact, many of them request their ranges to be listed at spamhaus proactively because they have in their policies that customers shouldn't run mail servers on them. However, as you also noted, you're not running a mail server but your mail server is including your connecting IP in a Received header, and a content filter is checking Received headers against blacklists.
I've noticed an increase in this as well. One of my filter servers fell in a /24 that got SBL'd (cloud provider IP range) and we saw email rejections due to this, even though the filter server doesn't deliver the mail but merely passes it to the relays.
I think if this is going to be the trend, the email provider removing the client IP from the Received headers before sending it on isn't an unreasonable ask. It can be argued as a violation of accepted RFC standard, but standards are less important than working around unfair algorithms.
I would recommend bringing it to your mail provider with that request in mind: That they remove your IP from headers before sending the email on. It is the SMTP server that you connect to which writes that Received header, so it is the job of that server or one after it to remove it and it's not something you can influence withot their help. Unless of course you are running your own mail server, in which case I'd highly recommend removing a Received header before sending it on.
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First thanks to JeremyNicoll for the detailed explanation and help. Also to garland for the help. After absorbing all that info I've tried a few things.
Here's what a I found. Yes this odd-ball problem is most likely going to become more of a problem in the future. I'm going to talk to my domain and email provider to see if they can do something to modify my outgoing emails to not include the IP address in the header.
Also I checked here and tried a different VPN service which DOES work with my emails. Now my sent emails using my preferred email client software no longer has that troublesome IP address in the headers. This is a "sorta" fix for my problem with my emails being blocked or not fixed. However, it's not perfect. Now I've found that "some" of my emails are being sent to people's spam filters.
I'm assuming that various security things are seeing no return IP address in the headers which is probably bringing up a "red flag" and kicking my emails to the user's spam folders. I am now in the process testing with a few of my email contacts to instruct them to add me to any "white list" or what-ever their software has to handle a false positive incoming potential spammer.
Meanwhile on the web site access .. as I mentioned in the beginning using a VPN service works for me most of the time. BUT as the anti-virus/spam techniques get more and more advanced (and overly aggressive?) I find some web sites will now not even allow a user who has an unknown (or) totally missing originating IP to even view the site.
FWIW, I think in the future the people designing and implementing these measures and applications need to do a little more thinking about the impact such measures can have on innocent, honest people.
Thanks everyone for some interesting observations and of course your help. For now I'll use a VPN application which will solve about 90 percent of the problems.