Just when long-suffering Virgin Media customers thought their spam woes had been fixed, it seems the firm's inbound mail server is now blocking the delivery of mail. The grey-listing anti-spam measure has been affecting users for several weeks, with many complaining of delays in receiving emails.
One customer wrote to The Register to explain the problem thus: "The first time round users get a 421 error, then in theory when the sending server attempts redelivery the mail should be accepted. "This is to help sort out the mail servers from the spam bots out there. Spam bots typically won't retry; mail servers always retry unless they get a definite 5xx error. "Virgin's solution continues to reject the mail servers when they come back."
[...] A Virgin Media spokesperson has been in touch to say: "Virgin Media takes internet security extremely seriously in order to protect our customers from viruses and cybercrime. As a result, our email filtering system will block emails it believes are suspicious.
"In this case, we believe a small number of users experienced issues when trying to send mail to Virgin Media email addresses because they were categorised as 'spam'. We've now rectified this and apologise for any inconvenience caused. We continue to review the system to ensure it's working effectively, while keeping our customers safe online. If users experience similar issues in sending mail to Virgin Media email addresses, we advise them to visit netreport.virginmedia.com/netreport."
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:12PM
I greylist on my home mail server. The only real problem I've experienced is that occasionally someone sending me mail gets informed by his mail system that the message was undeliverable, presumably because it misrepresents my return code. However, I still get those messages.
But yes, I still get spam. Hundreds of ads for drugs that soylent news won't let me mention, even though what I'm writing isn't spam. It doesn't take long to delete them. I just press d in mutt. I get rid of several per second. And I don't have to hunt for real messages in any spam folder.
-- hendrik