Email issues for Grapevine and APEX Telecom

The latest saga to do with relaying and blocking of emails has affected two Canberra-based ISPs this month.

Firstly, Grapevine have managed to have their entire block of mail servers blacklisted by both SORBS and/or LASHBACK for sending spam. Because of the listing on SORBS emails sent from Grapevine were being rejected by our mail server.

The blacklisting is something Grapevine need to address, but for now we've whitelisted their servers to allow emails through as some of our clients where having trouble sending emails to us and to other hosted domains.

The second problem recently has been with Apex Telecom who are blocking emails to some of our clients as well as intermittently blocking all emails from our mail server to their network.

While we're yet to get a clear answer, the reason appears to be that they're relying on the flawed SPF mail filtering system (references here and here). This system, when poorly implemented, rejects emails where a single address (e.g. ) has been expanded to go to more than one recipient.

Fortunately this appears to affect only two clients at the moment and we are working towards getting it resolved.

Little M Boutique »