I got mail late last night from one of the Spamhaus peeps telling me that they were under a distributed Denial of Service (dDOS) attack. This is affecting email. Incoming email is delayed and they’re having difficulty sending outgoing email. This is affecting their responses to delisting queries.
They are working on mitigation and hopefully will be fully up and running soon.
Updates when I get them.
Update (8/29/2012): mail to Spamhaus should be back.
Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL.
“SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream.
My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a false positive or Spamhaus overreaching. In this case, though, the headlines and the original article didn’t actually get the story right.
Spamhaus blocked a range of IP addresses that are owned by Google that included the IP for www.gmail.com. This range of IP addresses did not include the gmail outgoing mailservers.
Spamhaus says
Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools.
Read MoreSpamhaus announced today they are publishing two new BGP feeds: Extended DROP and the Botnet C&C list. These lists are intended for use inside routers in order to stop all traffic to or from listed IP addresses. This is a great way to impact botnet traffic and hopefully will have a significant impact on virus infections and botnet traffic.
In other news I’ve been hearing rumbling about changes at Yahoo. It looks like they have changed their filters and some senders are feeling lots of pain because of it. It looks like senders with low to mid range reputations are most affected and are seeing more and more of their mail hit the bulk folder. This afternoon I’m hearing that some folks are seeing delivery improvements as Yahoo tweaks the changes.