Royal Deer Design » spam

[Solved] Removing your IP from the Gmail Blacklist – Step by Step Solution

Sheuli — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 03:29:24 +0000

Being blacklisted by Gmail is relatively easy, especially if you use WordPress and do not worry much about the security of your site. Being listed on a Gmail Blacklist means your emails do not reach Gmail recipients, or your messages (sent via blacklisted server IP) go straight to the Spam folder. Google’s Blacklist is different than other blacklist and it is not easy to be de-listed.

Our long story short: we host sites of some of our clients on dedicated servers. One account on one of the servers was hacked (reason: not updated WordPress, weak admin password or some unknown plug-in installed) and started sending thousands of spam emails. The server was getting down (huge CPU and Memory usage) and of course our IP got listed on few blacklists. We took action and cleaned up our name (read IP), below you can read how we fixed the problem.

Step by step solution:

Cleanup your server. Detect the issue, remove the problem, and change passwords for your FTP and admin panel. Ask your hosting provider to scan your server searching for malwares and viruses. Monitor the site and logs for few days.
Create an account on mxtoolbox.com, check your IP. There you should be listed on some of those blacklists. Make sure to be removed from all lists – you need to work with each case separately. For some of them you need to simply wait and they will keep monitoring you for a week or so to see if your IP is still spamming. For others you need to send a request for removal and explain that you cleaned up your hacked server. You probably do not need a mxtoolbox paid account, because a free account should be sufficient.
IFF (only and only if) you are 100% sure your server is clean and mxtoolbox.com show that your IP is not listed anywhere, you can contact Google. You need to fill out this form – Report a delivery problem between your domain and Gmail.

Very important:

You need to answer all the questions there. Most of them are very technical and require an access to your server logs and settings. For some of the questions you may not have an exact answer, but provide there as accurate information as you can. If you are not a developer, find one :), or ask tech support of your hosting provider to answer those questions.
Be polite in your respond, say ‘thank you’ in the “Additional Information” section
Provide as much accurate information as possible.

It takes at least 1 month for Google to look into this and action. Unfortunately, you will not be notified about that, so you should set up some simple script that will send you an every day an email from your banned server IP. If one day you see this email in your Inbox, you know what that means :).

How to prevent being listed on blacklists:

Don’t spam :)
Keep a high security on your server, which starts with as simple task such as keeping your passwords difficult and periodically changed.
Make sure to update your CMS (such as WordPress) and plug-ins you use
Do not use unknown plug-ins or themes for your site. Buy them from well-known companies (such as themeforest.net).
Don’t host your site on shared-hosting. Always use good quality hosting providers. Forget about all those cheap GoDaddy for $3 per month solutions. If you are serious about your business, you will need to spend at least $50/month on a quality hosting.
If your website sends a lot of emails (password reminders, registration emails etc.), you should use mandrill.com.

ACH Payment 5535134 Canceled – ACH Payment Canceled Malware Email

Sheuli — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 06:53:10 +0000

If by any chance you receive an email from an address such as ach.01[at]nacha.org and with a subject line “ACH Payment 5535134 Canceled,” be aware this email contains a virus. This email is obviously not from the ACH and it is an attempt by Internet criminals to trick internet users into opening the attached file which contains malware.

Why do we write about this? We have recently experienced few alerts from our email server about this suspicious email. This is also a good opportunity for us to acknowledge how well Gmail (that we use to handle emails) deals with spam.

Below original message Royal Deer Design received from Gmail:

The message “ACH Payment 5535134 Canceled” from ach 01 (ach.01[at]nacha.org) contained a virus or a suspicious attachment. It was therefore not fetched from your account …….[at]royaldeerdesign.com and has been left on the server.

If you wish to write to ach, just hit reply and send ach a message.

Thanks,
The Gmail Team

Google War on Spam

Sheuli — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:24:30 +0000

Google has, and continues, to take a proactive approach toward spam. According to a post on Google’s official blog on Friday by Matt Cutts, Google’s search quality is presently “better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.”

Cutts also reminded users of the following principles which apply to Google search results: Google takes action against sites that violate its quality guidelines, regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google, displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google, and buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

Cutts also addressed the more recent problem of content farms, which consist mostly of what he described as “spammy or low-quality content,” assuring users that Google is as committed to the war on spam as ever.

Twitter reduces spam

Sheuli — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:50:19 +0000

According to a data from Twitter, the website recently significantly reduced spamming activity. On February 2009 only 5% of twitts were spam, on August 2009 more than 9% twitts were spam, on the beginning of 2010 only 1% of twitts are spam. You can read more at blog.twitter.com.