[hk.com]

Originally Posted by MrMoo

Who cares? All the SMTP servers are black listed for simply being in Hong Kong anyway. You should be using gmail, yahoo!, hotmail, etc if you value your email.

1. Compared to other countries HK has cleaned up its act on how much spam it sends out, so ALL smtp servers being black listed for being HK is nonsense. Yes, the big ISPs mail servers do get into black lists as they have users that they allow to relay their "marketing crap". They however are NOT all of HK's SMTP servers. In 6 years we have had our main servers addedd to RBLs 4 times or less.

2. If Value email use Gmail yahoo and hotmail?
That is the most furtherst away from the truth you could have said. These companies have very proven track records that they are shit, they become unavailable for 6 or 7 hours at a time. They lose email, they take even 3 days to deliver email. What I am telling you here, is based on what I've seen in the past 2 months, 2006, not 1986. These companies are clearly handing your email to be scanned by US goverment "in the name of war on terror", they are also will hand over your mail to any goverment who does not like what you say or think so they can keep on making money.

Well they have the big brands. The uneducated and people with low email requirements their mail who asses a service based on how many GB is the mail box, will keep using them.

[PDLM]

Originally Posted by MrMoo

You should be using gmail, yahoo!, hotmail, etc if you value your email.

What a bizarre statement! I have been very happily using Netvigator's SMTP server for years with no problems reported from any email recipients...

And what hk.com said.

[MrMoo]

Originally Posted by hk.com

1. Compared to other countries HK has cleaned up its act on how much spam it sends out, so ALL smtp servers being black listed for being HK is nonsense.

It doesn't matter if HK is cleaning up, all the big US ISPs still black mark all HK IP ranges. Easy example, setup a new server, verify its not in any RBL, senderbase.org, etc, then try to send a mail to any of the big US ISPs.

Then to try get a white listing with the big mail hosts, most of the options are only available if you send bulk email or spend a lot of money to Habeas. Bonded Sender might help with some mail hosts but studies have shown it can actually harm delivery.

Then talk to the staff at any of the ISPs and they will tell you that a lot of asia is simply black listed. Hotmail used to have a huge problem with Korean spam, now you pretty much get none from asia, however checkout the spam folder in Gmail and you will see a lot of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, even Thai spam.

2. If Value email use Gmail yahoo and hotmail?
That is the most furtherst away from the truth you could have said.

And yet still more reliable than many ISP or internal hosts, the biggest advantage is that most companies will specifically configure their filtering to allow mail from the big free email providers. If they don't they are not going to get email from the many people and small companies who use them. Yes Hotmail is terrible but is improving, Gmail have a huge number of servers and whilst the Hong Kong frontend frequently fails the mail still is delivered. One concern is that some people are reporting lost mail, some of this is due to no outbound re-send queue. Due to the number of users it appears that all the free email providers will immediately fail on delivery and will not try to re-send.

The largest disadvantage to using an ISP email is simply address lock in. Try moving, change ISP, live in a different country, and blam you can no longer use the same address.

[KnowItAll]

>> all the big US ISPs still black mark all HK IP ranges

Never had a problem with our emails. We send out over 5000 emails on a regular day and around 30,000+ when we send out mailers -- all from hong kong based IP addresses.

No problems with major networks like AOL / Gmail ... hotmail and yahoo tend to give us some problems because of warped spam filtering.

Also, all my work related emails end up going through Netvigator and other private IP ranges in Hong Kong .. not had any problems reported with my emails not getting through.

(Should qualify the "never" ... by saying "never had a problem which lasted more than a couple of days")

[MrMoo]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

We send out over 5000 emails on a regular day and around 30,000+ when we send out mailers -- all from hong kong based IP addresses.

Yes, the filtering seems to be biased in favour of those sending a medium amount though. Under 100 per day and it can end up unlisted on senderbase. I think you can maintain a reasonable level of mail the filters record that you are not spamming and so deliver through.

Do you know any HK host that provides MX backup service? I see that pacific.net servers have it setup but the engineers and sales team have no idea what it is.

[MrMoo]

Originally Posted by hk.com

They however are NOT all of HK's SMTP servers. In 6 years we have had our main servers addedd to RBLs 4 times or less.

Probably need to redefine blacklisting as how Spam Assassin works, you get points against by being asia based, but you get points for by maintaining a good rating with a recordable level of email throughput.

I have started to see people complain in the US too though, spam filters are starting to tune against low volume senders. These are only the filters implemented by AOL, Hotmail, Optimum Online, Earthlink, SBC, etc, providers, Google is more friendly. It becomes more scary when looking at smaller US ISP email though, for example frontiernet happily blocks Yahoo! Hong Kong, and most Japan ISP mail too.

[KnowItAll]

MrMoo: Do you know what ruleset in Spamassasin degrades Asian IP addresses? I could not find anything in my installation.

There are some rules which degrade asian character sets .. cant see any asian ip based rules.

[MrMoo]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

MrMoo: Do you know what ruleset in Spamassasin degrades Asian IP addresses? I could not find anything in my installation.

I'm referring to the unhelpful articles like Walling off Asian E-mail to Prevent Spam and Geo-IP blocking in SysAdmin magazine.

[KnowItAll]

Overpaid consultants trying to get some attention.

[hk.com]

Originally Posted by MrMoo

It doesn't matter if HK is cleaning up, all the big US ISPs still black mark all HK IP ranges. Easy example, setup a new server, verify its not in any RBL, senderbase.org, etc, then try to send a mail to any of the big US ISPs.

Mark all HK IP address? Sorry that is rubbish. We are not blocked by any of the US ISPs, we don't have any issues delivery email anywhere. If we do discover this, we would work around the clock, phone fax and have a chat with the other mail admins.

But sure if you go an setup a mail server on say i-Cable or non corporate IP address block, yes you do get blocked for sure. That that is NOT all HK ip addresses.

Originally Posted by MrMoo

Then to try get a white listing with the big mail hosts, most of the options are only available if you send bulk email or spend a lot of money to Habeas. Bonded Sender might help with some mail hosts but studies have shown it can actually harm delivery.

Why do we need to get a white listing? We are not black listed so, they will apply their rate limiting analysis to our traffic and work out that we are sending good email.

Originally Posted by MrMoo

Then talk to the staff at any of the ISPs and they will tell you that a lot of asia is simply black listed. Hotmail used to have a huge problem with Korean spam, now you pretty much get none from asia, however checkout the spam folder in Gmail and you will see a lot of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, even Thai spam.

Yeah dude, it is the asian's who are the F-ing spammers! That is why still like 60 or 70% of the world spam originates from the US. Lets keep racism and spam as separate issues.

Originally Posted by MrMoo

And yet still more reliable than many ISP or internal hosts, the biggest advantage is that most companies will specifically configure their filtering to allow mail from the big free email providers. If they don't they are not going to get email from the many people and small companies who use them. Yes Hotmail is terrible but is improving, Gmail have a huge number of servers and whilst the Hong Kong frontend frequently fails the mail still is delivered. One concern is that some people are reporting lost mail, some of this is due to no outbound re-send queue. Due to the number of users it appears that all the free email providers will immediately fail on delivery and will not try to re-send.

Who care about why they lose mail, bad queue management, hardware failure, server failure, storage failure. The fact is that they do lose email regularly. I have to a few times per month answer queires from our customers as to why they have not got email from one of these providers, and we have to sit there cranking through our logs until we have the proof that we didn't screw up. So far we have not been at fault, and this issue is actually is costing us time and money. None of the freemail providers cut it in my opinion.

White listing the big providers is a big mistake a sure way to let spam into your servers.

Originally Posted by MrMoo

The largest disadvantage to using an ISP email is simply address lock in. Try moving, change ISP, live in a different country, and blam you can no longer use the same address.

Very true. The best thing I like is when companies go and paint xyz@netvigator.com on their Trucks.