Unless they tell you, you may not know

We've recently starting experiencing a phenomenon that many others across the wonderful internet have for a couple years now: Comcast blacklisting. Apparently, Comcast thinks one of our webhost's email servers is being used to send SPAM email, and so now, all email from one of our host's email farm is blacklisted, so emails we are trying to send from our duckfamily.net accounts to anyone with a Comcast email address is not being delivered. That I know of, no notice is given to the Comcast subscriber that an email was blocked. I heard that the NFC mail server was blacklisted, too...

Googling comcast+blacklist will get you a couple hundred thousand hits. Why did Comcast have to resort to such measures? Did they send out advance notices about blacklisting? If I had received emails back saying, "Hey, we delivered this, but the server you're using is going to be blocked unless your provider stops sending SPAM" then I'd much more happy. But they didn't do that.

Is my webhost at fault here? Probably. They've had problems with servers doing relaying in the past and have worked to lock them down. I'd be willing to bet that some are still doing it. Problem is that my specific mail server is the one being blacklisted. I've let them know there's a problem and they say they're looking into it.

So, why aren't more web hosts using SMTP authentication? For most users, this would be a slam-dunk. Sure, it takes 3-5 more seconds to send the email, but would this impact your daily email life? I don't think so. Would it impact the life of a spammer? You bet! For a small spamming of 5000 emails, that adds 7 hours to the email sending process. And that's a small amount of spam email. For the big spammers, it would take them days longer to spam out the hundreds of thousands of emails they send daily.

So, ask your host to start using SMTP authentication today! :)