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Our mail server has been blacklisted by lashback.com because "Sender has sent to LashBack Unsubscribe Probe accounts", but we haven't hosted any mailing lists for years. Our server responds to such requests, whether legitimate or merely Lashback probes, as undelivered mail (see log fragment below). Is that the wrong behavior? If so, what is the correct behavior?

(Well over a year ago we removed mailman from our server altogether, which was long after we ceased to operate any mailing lists.)

According to its website, Lashback's blacklist is developed from a number of tests, including the following that appear to be (possibly) relevant:

  • Which senders fail to provide a working unsubscribe mechanism
  • Which senders do not honor unsubscribe requests within 10 business days

I have tried to contact lashback.com by phone and e-mail without success. Phone calls are answered by a robot (literally) that suggests an e-mail address. When I sent a message to it asking for information as to the correct behavior, my message blocked by Google Groups as bulk email. I guess this was because our mail server is blacklisted by lashback; we know of no other blacklistings of our server, and my message didn't look any more like bulk e-mail than this StackOverflow question does. The only prompt remedy available from Lashback is to use their free offer to remove our server from their blacklist once per month, but will not solve the problem, and we can't afford to do that every month. Lashback asks a significant monthly fee for any other service. (I wonder. Is Lashback actually a scam? Or are they just having a Very Bad Day with their systems?)

Here is a possibly-relevant fragment of our server's mail log. It might be from Lashback's probe account. We don't get much mail to this long-defunct mailing list. As far as I can tell, Postfix tries to send it to mailman, but there is no mailman any more, and eventually Postfix gives up and sends a nondelivery notice, which causes LashBack to blacklist us. 

Oct 28 16:07:56 amati postfix/qmgr[5010]: B21A1367B1FE: from=<office@moic.gov.bh>, size=2917, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Oct 28 16:07:56 amati local[20602]: fatal: execvp /var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper: No such file or directory
Oct 28 16:07:56 amati postfix/local[20601]: B21A1367B1FE: to=<sc34wg3@mail.petesbox.net>, relay=local, delay=433470, delays=433470/0/0/0.14, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: local: fatal: execvp /var/lib/mailman/mail/wrapper: No such file or directory )
Oct 28 16:07:56 amati postfix/qmgr[5010]: B21A1367B1FE: from=<office@moic.gov.bh>, status=expired, returned to sender
Oct 28 16:07:56 amati postfix/cleanup[20604]: EF8C13F4CDF6: message-id=<20151028200756.EF8C13F4CDF6@mx1.petesbox.net>
Oct 28 16:07:57 amati postfix/qmgr[5010]: EF8C13F4CDF6: from=<>, size=4872, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Oct 28 16:07:57 amati postfix/bounce[20603]: B21A1367B1FE: sender non-delivery notification: EF8C13F4CDF6
Oct 28 16:07:57 amati postfix/qmgr[5010]: B21A1367B1FE: removed
Steve Newcomb
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1 Answers1

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This question has become academic, because the real problem was that the server on the LashBack blacklist was not actually ours! When our registrar discovered the problem, our server's reputation at mxtoolbox.com was immediately restored.

The source of the problem turned out to be one of a series of unfortunate system glitches that occurred when we started using our registrar's default name service. Prior to that, we had been using free name service, which worked perfectly until the presumably-automatic switchover, when the glitches occurred.

There is no substitute for dig, or for careful attention to its output, or for actually seeing the surprises that may be in that output.

Steve Newcomb
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