I started using the Rackspace cloud because of Rackspace’s good reputation and of course the ability to host multiple servers on a cloud at an “affordable” price.
The Rackspace cloud gives you the ability to add multiple cloud servers on the go and resize them according to your resource needs. They bill you per hour based on the amount of resources (disk space and RAM) and the total amount of bandwidth that you use per month.
I had one server on the Rackspace cloud with 160Gb hard drive space and 4096Mb of RAM. Unfortunately, after spending several days migrating all my sites over to the new cloud server I realized that easily about 60 – 70% of all outgoing emails to clients, colleagues, friends, etc. bounced back stating that that MTA has a poor reputation. I checked to see if my IP was on a blacklist and so it was. The IP was blacklisted on spam.dnsbl.sorbs.net and still is as you’ll see here (type in 174.143.170.243).
If the IP was blacklisted due to my own malicious work, I would take responsibility for it but this is how I got the IP in the first place. Not only that single IP is blacklisted but the entire IP range is blacklisted so it is affecting thousands of users. So I contacted Rackspace support and their response was…
Unfortunately in order for SORBS to delist an entire IP range/block from their database SORBS requires a large donation, which is not something we are willing/able to do. We can submit individual requests for customers on a one off basis only.
Thank you for contacting The Rackspace Cloud technical support. Please let us know if we can assist you further.
It is not possible to switch out an IP on a cloud server either. If the IP could’ve been switched with a new/different one, it could solve the problem but the only way of obtaining a new IP is by deleting your cloud server and creating a new one. And how you do migrate your data? You copy it over via shell and YES, you pay for that bandwidth.
That was 2 months ago and after numerous follow-up tickets from myself and a monotonous response from them “We have submitted your IP to be delisted from SORBS but that is the extent of what we can do. Please let us know if there is anything else you need.
“, the issue still hasn’t been resolved. I’m very sorry but I cannot pay that much for a server with the fear of every email bouncing back due to the blacklisting. Many of my clients hosted on my server were frustrated due to this since their emails to their clients couldn’t go through either. Not all but many emails bounced back.
My personal opinion and recommendation is that you save yourself the trouble, tears, time and stress by choosing another, more reliable provider. Sorry for the negativity but I was quite worked up because of this but feel relieved that I’ve moved all my stuff and I’m cancelling the cloud server today with pleasure.
April 27th, 2010 at 11:06 am
I manage a huge site on EC2 now and we had the same issue. It’s a matter of spammers opening up accounts, sending their **** and leaving.
The remedy for us was authsmtp.com, the setup was exrememly easy and the pricing is ridiculously cheap. There are plent of email relay services out there but I found them to be the best match for us.
Good luck though.
April 27th, 2010 at 11:12 am
@Dan,
Yes, true, I used AuthSMTP as well but with many sites and many PHP applications running on the server, it was too much trouble to go in and configure AuthSMTP for each of those scripts. One should have the freedom of being able to send emails through PHP sendmail and not worry whether or not emails will be delivered.
The best solution for me was to move to a different provider where I can easily switch out IP addresses.
April 27th, 2010 at 11:13 am
One more thing. I manage my own rails sites on the Cloud and I’ve found the easiest way to do a migration is to backup the current site, then deploy a new server from a backup. That will give you a new ip and it would only take a few hours, no SSH transfers and bandwidth affected. You just need to update your configs ( http ) because they’ll have the old ip.
I do this for staging huge upgrades to my services, since I can get an exact setup of the current server, run all the updates I need, test and either migrate or run the same commands on the production server ( knowing now nothing will fail ). It’s a good way to have a staging site without having to pay for the server running 24/7 without use.
April 27th, 2010 at 11:24 am
I’m not sure why you would update all the php scripts instead of just configuring sendmail to use authsmtp as a relay on the server.
I do get the point though:
1) RS cloud support is not great
2) Why pay for another service to fix the problem
For my client ( thescene.com ) it’s cheaper to be on EC2 and authsmtp than getting dedicated boxes somewhere else.
Cheers!
May 2nd, 2010 at 9:38 pm
I have multiple servers with Rackspace, same thing happened I called their tech support and they removed my ip from the blacklist and now everything works fine. You might want to check with them before claiming that they have not resolved your issue.
May 3rd, 2010 at 3:17 am
@Kerim, was it also blacklisted on SORBS? Maybe you were lucky that only your IP was blacklisted and not an entire IP range. Additionally, some blacklists are easier to get delisted from than others. I manually removed myself from several lists but after getting stuck on getting delisted on SORBS, I contacted Rackspace upon which they weren’t able to help me.
May 9th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Why not set up google apps and have them handle the email? That way, you don’t have to worry about the IP being blacklisted since it’s coming from google.
May 10th, 2010 at 7:20 am
The SocketLabs Email On-Demand will provide you with an affordable hosted SMTP relay and takes care of keeping your reputation clean. It only takes a few minutes to integrate with the service and it also offers excellent reporting and and a great API. Full disclosure: I am a SocketLabs employee and founder.
If you are interested: http://www.socketlabs.com/od.
May 15th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
The main problem is with anti-spam organizations like SORBS (and Spamhaus) who black list an entire IP range because one IP in that range sent spam. I don’t know about SORBS, but at Spamhaus they will not delist the range unless the hosting company proves to them that they have terminated the offending person’s account. We experienced this, as the offending party, due to one of our client’s spamming.
Basically what they are doing is trying to force the hosting company to terminate the offender, or pay a sum of money (blackmail), by holding innocent people (all the non-offending IPs) hostage. In my books, that is just plain wrong on all levels. That isn’t Rackspace’s fault. I don’t blame them for not paying the blackmail. You pay a blackmailer once and it only encourages them to continue.
I don’t know enough about cloud servers to comment on the ability to change IPs. But, I wonder if you wouldn’t have the same difficulties changing the IP at any hosting company.
June 8th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Too bad Antonie, other from this big problem, did you like the cloud?
July 2nd, 2010 at 6:53 am
“to delist an entire IP range/block from their database SORBS requires a large donation”
This sounds more like a problem with SORBS then with Rackspace Cloud – they appear to be running what amounts to an extortion racket.
“Nice IP range you’ve got there… it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
July 6th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Would it just be faster to have the spam blacklist owners arrested for extortion?
July 18th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
It has nothing to do with spammers, never has.
The anti-spam places are all run by the old school spammers who discovered there was better, legal, money in extortion.
No anti-spam org has ever been motivated by anti-spam.
August 31st, 2010 at 10:40 pm
We’re having the same problem with RackSpaceCloud.
All RackSpaceCloud IP’s are blacklisted by SpamHaus and Sorbs.
I have tried creating 10 servers and got 10 differente IP’s. All listed on both of these lists, sometimes on others too.
The most troubling is SpamHaus, that will keep you from sending mail to Yahoo, Hotmail and many other big name e-mail providers.
Despite this I’ve been a customer for over a year now and I’m overall happy.
I also had the initial frustration that the author wrote about, but I got over it after their support delisted us from all blacklist except Sorbs (Sorbs seems to demand money to do it, isn’t it like a bribe?).
But I do think RackspaceCloud should take the issue at their hands and do something about it, I mean other than delisting clients manually.
How about a new IP range?
Or mass delist the IP’s and keep them from being listed again?
Or perhaps keep two IP’s ranges, one for customers with no spam record to use. The other range for spam prone customers.
This is damaging the otherwise great reputation of Rackspace.
Other than that, the RackspaceCloud folks are doing a hell of a good job! Keep it up guys!
November 10th, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Why are Yahoo! and Hotmail business partners with the likes of these extortionist blacklisters? Could it be that they too were the victims of the extortion? How can it be that no law enforcement is brought into this situation? Do end users need to file some class action suits?
Maybe all the big email providers just need to unhook from the extortionists for a trial run and see what happens.
Maybe during Thanksgiving week, eh?
January 7th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
I faced a similiar problem with rackspacecloud for incoming eMails. Even I have choosen that all email should be delivered without check for SPAM regular email do not reach me. The support told me that independant of my selection emails blacklisted will be deleted without informing me or the sender. They have no solution for that problem. If someone knows more reliable providers…
April 27th, 2011 at 7:18 am
Their support is great! I never even considered using their email, I just use Google Apps, easy to setup and use. If you cant handle it, get one of the vendors set it up for your westup.com, smartgoogleapps.com…
May 12th, 2011 at 8:48 am
This is an interesting discussion. Sorbs has been the bain of my life for about 12-18 months. I maintain a longstanding email address at mail.com(Now AOL) and I do website update work for two web sites in the UK based at a hoster Newnet. SORBS got involved in blocking my mail between Mail.com and my clients accounts at Newnet, I am based in Singapore and they eventually got involved with my mail at my ISP here on my domain itcs.sg. So I decided to try and find out who SORBs are? After working with Newnet and my ISP (Plazon). I believe that they are a buch of self appointed spam policemen i.e they all work for no remuneration and most of them are supposed to be based out of Australia. So I too checked if I was the cause. I joined their web site group, logged a ticket and the answer was that I was an innocent victim.
This may meet SORBS evangilistic zeal but it has cost me many hours of work in avoiding their disruption, investigating if I was the course and testing alternate mail option.
But to date I still cannot find a Sorbs executive on record to send an invoice for my time.
My view is that Rackspace is also the victim – and I do not want them making donations to the Royal Children hosptial in the UK. this is straight out blackmail.
My view is that SORBS needs to be shut down.
Max Collins
August 18th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Those dudes at RackSpaceCloud are actually looking at your files 24/7.
They have a list of names the system runs through to see who they accept or not.
One time my account was approved and then terminated.
i called and they asked me for my name and etc, and then said ” i am sorry sir i have to let you go ” and hung up on me while i was still talking .
- Ali Riza Mehmeti Mujahiddin Al Allah
November 13th, 2011 at 1:30 pm
I have to admit, reading this I’m a bit perplexed. Unless you own the address space(and even then), there is the potential for this to happen and I wouldn’t really consider this to be so much Rackspace’s problem as it a problem with nefarious account holders or individual who don’t understand how to secure their mail servers. There is a reason organizations exist that dedicate their business to the deliverability of your e-mail. This idea that “no matter what” your e-mail is going to be delivered from some random node on the internet without triggering spam filters is fool hardy these days. The fact of the matter is there is a laundry list of things you need to do to configure an e-mail server (like configuring an spf record in dns, domain keys, etc) as a baseline. From there you need to be prepared to go through motions with the big mail providers, like hotmail, yahoo, etc, to ensure your mail is delivered properly. Take eBay for instance, they have an entire department dedicated specifically to working with other corporations to ensure the deliverability of their mail to their customers. You simply cannot compete with these kinds of resources.
If you’re using sendmail, configuring it to authenticate and route through a smart host whom you’re paying to assist in ensuring the delivery of your e-mail, is a very simple thing to do and there are are many economical providers out there.
I can understand your frustration with the lack of response/direction from Rackspace…but…I think you’re just dodging the issue for awhile by moving to another provider….
November 29th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
I realize this is an old post, but I want to add my comments. First, this is not a Rackspace Cloud problem. Any cloud provider could potentially have the same issue. An IP gets blacklisted because of the person using the server and how they are using it, not because of the hosting provider. Any hosting provider in the world, dedicated or virtual, could run into the same issue (unless you are hosting your own servers within your own organization where you have your own Class C control everything happening on that range).
Saying you’re going to choose “another, more reliable provider” doesn’t really make sense as the reliability of the provider has absolutely nothing to do with wheter or not an IP gets blacklisted. How did your new provider work out? I’d be willing to bet they have some blacklisted IPs as well.
Also, everyone has to go through the same process to get delisted, Rackspace doesn’t have any special power to remove an IP from those spam listings.
Rackspace ditching an IP range and getting a new one wouldn’t really solve the problem either, as they could get their new range blacklisted by one rogue web server sending out spam.
Personally, I think Rackspace is probably safer than most as they are generally a reputable company and since they are slightly more expensive than many others, it’s less likely that spammers will gravitate to them.
This is what I would recommend (and what I’ve done on my own Rackspace Cloud): when you spin up a new Cloud server, start by checking that IP against all known spam databases before you start using the server. The IPs I got were all clear. If for some reason yours isn’t, just delete that cloud server and start over with a new one. Do this every time you add a new server as a first step and you shouldn’t have to worry about it.
January 5th, 2012 at 7:43 am
The blacklisted IP was not the problem… the problem was that they weren’t willing to swap out a blacklisted IP which I got the moment I opened the container.