The Tech Bench: Controlling spam and mistakenly blacklisted IPs

Editor’s Note: For this week’s Tech Bench, we thought we’d share the particulars of a recent MST ticket. If you’ve ever struggled with administering email  for clients over your VPS, this is one’s for you.

Recently, a customer submitted a ticket to the MST asking for help with the email on his VPS. It quickly came to the attention of our Director of Network Compliance, Mike Witty, when the customer explained that all email going through the mail delivery IP address on his server was being blocked by AOL, Gmail and AT&T.

The reason given by the email services for blocking his IP address was that it was a suspected source of spam. Yet the customer was in contact with all the users on his VPS and knew that they were not sending out spam.

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ServInt Answers: What Does “Network Compliance” Mean?

Mike Witty, Director of Network Compliance

Hi, I’m Mike Witty, ServInt’s new Director of Network Compliance.

To those outside of our industry, the words “Network Compliance” probably sound a bit cryptic – even bureaucratic.  But network compliance actually affects every single customer we have.  I’d like to take this opportunity to explain how, and why.

First, a little about me. I’ve been at ServInt for more than ten years now — roughly 100 years in Internet time. I first cut my teeth as a member of ServInt’s Managed Services Team and worked my way up to management from there. Over the years, I’ve seen our service offerings evolve dramatically, and it’s been an exciting ride.

When I started here in 2000, the vast majority of the content on the Internet was static – basically little strings of HTML.  These sites rarely broke on their own, if ever. Since then, there have been seismic shifts in web technology and there is a constant race to remain up-to-date and competitive.

But, as always, there’s a tradeoff.  For every internet app that changes our lives for the better, there’s a new security concern, and a new way for the bad guys to reach out and cause trouble.  As head of ServInt’s Network Compliance Team, my job is to protect and defend our customers, content creators, and ServInt as a whole, to the best of our ability. Here are just a few of the challenges my team and I face daily and some tips on how to avoid becoming a victim.
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