Email Issues with Earthlink
Here’s why some Earthlink customers were having issues with emails:
CBL temporarily inhibited our IPs from being blocked several days ago, so our listings there (and with XBL/spamhaus) have ceased. We’re still talking with them to get this resolved permanently, and our IPs should not be blocked by them in the meantime. As many of you noticed, however, mail to Earthlink is still being blocked.
We have been emailing Earthlink since 12/30, before we ever contacted CBL. After 6 emails we unfortunately haven’t received anything but autoresponses from Earthlink’s blacklist/abuse address. We’ve spoken with their techs via chat and phone and have not been able to get through to anyone above their first tier of support; attempts to transfer to a supervisor were met with 20 minutes on hold and the call being dumped.
We will still be attempting to contact Earthlink to get this particular issue resolved, but if you are an Earthlink customer and are being impacted by this (such as if you utilize forwarding to an Earthlink address — and we know there are several thousand of you), you may wish to contact their support and let them know that we have been writing them to get information about this block and how it can be resolved. [...]
Finally, I do apologize for the impact on everyone. Blacklistings are no fun for anyone, and unfortunately we’ve found that large ISPs are the biggest headache to get de-listed from, as it’s incredibly hard for us to get a human response out of them. Still, we can’t fix the problem on our end (if there is one) without them responding to us to let us know what the problem is. There needs to be a reasonable amount of earnest communication on both ends for these issues to be resolved, and we are certainly trying to meet our end of the bargain there! We aren’t shy about disabling spammers when we find them, and certifiable spammers are actually pretty rare on our primary SMTP machines judging by the (few) complaints we get.
Thanks to everyone for continued patience, which understandably may be wearing thin!