[RESOLVED] February 2021 -- issues with email delivery

Some of you may have noticed you are not receiving emails from atWar currently... things like password reset emails, turn notifications, etc. This is NOT a technical problem on atWar's end. Rather, its an issue being caused by a certain 3rd party which we are fighting against. (More about this below, if you want to know...)

So far we know users of the following email services are affected by this:

• Microsoft-hosted email services (like @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, @msn.com etc.)
  
• GMX (@gmx.net, @gmx.de, @gmx.fr, etc.) Update Feb.25: GMX responded and said they are accepting our emails again.
  

If your email address is at one of these services, you will not be able to receive emails from us until this issue is resolved. If you need to contact us, I recommend using the atWar chat system and asking a moderator for assistance. (You can use the /report command in game.) If you can't login due to a forgotten password, use a guest or alt account to reach a moderator.

(Other email services like gmail are so far working fine...)

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Why is this happening?

It's because the IP address of atWar's mail server is currently blacklisted by one particular spam blacklist, called UCEPROTECTL3.

There are probably 30+ popular spam blacklists maintained by various organizations... all except UCEPROTECT show that we are clean. That's because atWar doesn't send spam. We do everything the right way, according to the rules.

In fact, even UCEPROTECT says that it is not a ban against us specifically -- they decided to ban our entire host! Quote from their own website:

Cituj:

As you should know now: It is not you, it is your complete provider which got UCEPROTECT-Level 3 listed.
Your IP 104.248.84.59 was NOT part of abusive action, but you are the one that has freely chosen your provider.
By tolerating or ignoring that your provider doesn't care about abusers you are indirectly also supporting the global spam with your money.
Seen from this point of view, you really shouldn't wonder about the consequences.

How's that for a wonderfully arrogant statement?

Our mail server is hosted at Digital Ocean. If you're not familiar with it, Digital Ocean is one of the largest cloud server providers in the United States. In other words, because we happen to use one of the largest providers in the U.S. (with over 2.4 million IP addresses included in this ban, according to them), we are somehow part of the problem and must be punished?



...But wait, they are so nice they give us a solution to "fix" this. All we have to do is "whitelist" our IP address with them, all for the low low price of just 25 CHF per month!



I ask you, how is this legal? They create the problem, then offer to fix it for a "fee"... is that not the very definition of blackmail?

Needless to say, I will not be paying it. I do not respond to blackmail, end of story. So what else am I doing about it? Well, at the moment I've been contacting the various email providers' (Microsoft, GMX) postmasters asking them to 1) unban our IP address and 2) consider not using UCEPROTECT at all. Like I said, there are many more reputable spam blacklists to choose from.

I'm not too hopeful at this point, but it's a start. After all, my company is just a tiny speck on the internet landscape.... nobody really cares about us. However we are certainly not the only ones affected by this issue... if enough backlash is generated against UCEPROTECT, the situation will be resolved for everyone sooner or later.

Like I said, every server hosted at Digital Ocean is effected by this, which means 2+ million servers. So far Digital Ocean doesn't seem to want to get involved -- their support has been dismissive about doing anything. I think the really correct solution is for the various email providers to stop using UCEPROTECT completely -- they are behaving like complete and total scammers.

If not, then we *could* use an email sending service (like SendGrid, MailGun, etc.) but I prefer not to since 1) those services cost money and 2) it seems ridiculous in principle that we should have to give up our own perfectly working email server just because 1 random somebody says so.

Another option is I could move our mail server to a different provider other than Digital Ocean. I actually maintain several mail servers already at various providers, and the non-Digital Ocean ones have not had any problem like this so far. I would rather not do this because 1) its a lot of unnecessary work and 2) again, its ridiculous that we should have to move our server just because 1 random somebody says so. However if it comes to be that there really is no other solution, I may end up moving the server (and grumbling about it, but whatever). I would rather spend the time to do that, than pay anything to these UCEPROTECT blackmailers.

Such are the joys of being in the tech business.