@Ubuntu.com email (5th update)

I just checked the TWC blocked site again and saw great news.

fiordland.canonical.com is no longer blocked!! The bad news, my contact email finally ‘bounced’ over to the temporary account I setup, so I can’t really test if this worked. I will change it back and give it another test, though that may have to wait another 48 hours.

@Ubuntu.com email (update 4)

One of the accounts that I used to test my @ubuntu.com email finally got an undeliverable email response. This indicated that the @ubuntu.com emails come from fiordland.canonical.com. So Canonical has chlorine.canonical.com, palladium.canonical.com and fiordland.canonical.com. Backscatter, the extortionist blacklist, has fiordland.canonical.com on its list. Neither Spamhaus or Returnpath listed it. So another decision by TWC to block a domain based on a single blacklist from an organization that extorts money from domain holders. Not acceptable. Here are the results.

This makes reference to the ‘score’ and Returnpath does list this server as a ‘high risk’.

I put in the request to unblock this email server, but I will have to see what happens. I just wish that this information could have been obtained from some sort of community documentation or perhaps in response to the tickets I put in. The fact that Canonical appears to not have the resources to respond to things that impact the people who are their grass roots marketing team is a bit frustrating, but in the end this is not Canonical’s fault. Time Warner Cable is just being really, really paranoid with their blacklist implementation.

I would like to see a community sysadmin team that could triage problems for the Canonical sysadmin team. Something similar to bug-control.

@Ubuntu.com email not working (third update)

More interesting data concerning my issue with @ubuntu.com email not working. It would appear that @ubuntu.com and list.ubuntu.com emails come from chlorine.canonical.com, but launchpad emails (which I previously tested as working) come from palladium.canonical.com.

When using several MX tools that show blacklists chlorine.canonical.com is listed as blocked and palladium. canonical.com is not.

The tools I used are:

• http://www.mxtoolbox.com/
• https://www.senderscore.org/blacklistlookup/ (return path)
• http://www.spamhaus.org

Return Path originally listed the domain, but I was able to quickly ask that it be removed. I then tested several minutes later and it was no longer being listed. mxtoolbox.com still lists the site with two of its results; one of which was the one that blocks for four weeks unless you pay.

I am still waiting on a response from TWC on them white listing Canonical; I hope good sense prevails in that case, but we will see.

@Ubuntu email not working (2nd update)

I received an email from the Time Warner systems administrators this morning in regards to my email not working.

It appears that the IP address of the sender is being blocked by one or more 3rd 
party blacklist sites. While Time Warner is not affiliated with these sites, we 
do take their lists into account in order to protect the whole of the Roadrunner 
users from spam. They will need to contact these sites in order to have the 
blocks removed. Once this is done, then you should see the errors go away. To 
find out which sites they are blacklisted on, please go to www.mxtoolbox.com and 
enter the IP address of 91.189.94.204. This will give you a comprehensive list 
of who has found the IP address to be questionable.  They will need to contact 
each individual blacklist group to have the IP removed from their listing.

So it appears that Time Warner is blocking email from Canonical due to their using some sort of blacklisting tool which queries this on-line database. When I check the database there are two sites that list Canonical as blocked

• Backscatterer.org
• SORBS-SPAM

Now this is where it gets interesting. I went to those sites and was told by Backscatterer.org that the listing would expire on August 29th unless I wanted to pay $75 for expedited removal. That seems more like blackmail than a legitimate blacklisting process. At this point it looks like I have to continue to change over all my email lists to an email that is not on my ISP and change my business cards. I am not sure what good it will do to tell my ISP that they are blocking a legitimate company due to a policy of blocking email because a domain has two block results in a large list.

@Uubntu email update

With a little help from my friends (Beatles reference) I was able to get the server, email address and domain that list.ubuntu.com emails come from. I would imagine that @ubuntu.com addresses are also handled through the same domain. With a little bit of testing it appears as though the domain is being blocked by my ISP; Time Warner Cable. After chatting with the support technician via the 24/7 help desk I was asked to report the issue to a particular email address at TWC (not given to protect the email address). I certainly hope to get to the bottom of this.

@Ubuntu email not working…

First let me apologize to anyone that tried reaching me with my @ubuntu email address recently. I am not ignoring you, but there is a problem with the email getting forwarded to my ‘real’ account.

The facts:
At some point in recent past my email @ubuntu.com email address stopped being received by my real email account. No failure was sent to the sender. It did not go in to any spam filter. I was alerted to this by a person who is used to my quick response and thought it was odd that I had not responded to three of their emails.

I checked launchpad to ensure that my real address was listed as my contact address. I tried using the “contact this person” feature and got an email. I then tried, using a different email, sending an email directly to the @ubuntu.com address. Nothing. No failed message and no message received. I hit a digital abyss with my message.

I then reported the problem on Launchpad then later was directed to use rt@ubuntu.com. When I followed up on the #canonical-sysadmin channel I was told to resubmit since the original apparently never made it in to the system. The original report was sent on August 3rd at roughly 17:23 GMT. The second, sent by request, was sent August 4th at 10:48 GMT.

I still have a non-working email address and I have no idea what the status is. I look at the ticket in rt, but only see the admonishment not to put in duplicate request. No assignment. Nothing that would give me hope that this will be resolved or at least investigated.

I understand that this is a free service that Canonical is providing. I also understand that I am providing Canonical a free service as an Ubuntu advocate. A service that I perform via this very same @ubuntu.com email that is non-functional. I do not expect instant service, but I think it would be reasonable to have some feedback as to a time frame. This would allow me to change my email list subscriptions so I can continue to work with the various teams I am part of.

As a systems administrator myself I know how important email is to the people I support. I would never expect them to be happy with non-functional email that does not alert the sender to the issue. I would never expect them to accept the fact that they would not receive any updates or time estimates in regards to resolving the issue. As a community advocate, LUG leader, Python group leader, Beginners Team Council member and LoCo lead I also do not want to depend on a system that works this way. I have higher standards for myself.

This leads me to question depending on my @ubuntu.com email. Is that really the issue? Could my ISP be blocking email from the server forwarding the @ubuntu.com email? I have to make a decision and for the sake of the people I work with I need to make one soon.