I host several websites on Amazon EC2, and am unable to send email from there because all of my IPs are blacklisted. I've heard that all of Amazon's IPs get blacklisted automatically because they are the source of so much spam.

Right now I'm sending email from a physical server but am looking for a place where I can host a mail server without having to deal with physical hardware (the disk drives, they fail *all* the time!).

I can't use a hosted email solution because several of these websites send out forum messages using the from address of the person who posted the message. Most services require you to certify that you own the addresses you'll be sending from, so I need to control the mail server myself. I have sendmail (feel free to shudder here configured to only accept messages from certain IP addresses, so I don't have any open relays.

So, have you all had any trouble with being blacklisted? And do you see any problems with me being able to set this up on a Linode VPS?

Thanks!

janine

I managed to get *myself* blacklisted due to a stupid misconfiguration on my part, but that was my own problem and I dealt with it and moved on

In general, Linode should not be blacklisted. I think there was one blacklist that included them just because they didn't like the format that Linode used for their default RDNS, but luckily it wasn't a blacklist that had much credibility.

http://multirbl.valli.org/
Enter an IP address here to test it against all possible DNS blacklists. For example, my Linode IP address 173.255.208.9 is listed in only blackholes.five-ten-sg.com apparently because they dislike the entire /24 subnet. AFAIK that isn't a very safe DNSBL so I'm not too worried about it.

There is a reason hosted email services won't let you do this, but unless you manage to get yourself blacklisted the linode IP's are usually pretty clean. Every once in a while they end up in UCEPROTECT levels 2 and 3, but nobody in their right mind would be using those to reject email.

Well yes, but as far as I know as long as the mail server is set up to only accept email from known servers then it's equally secure. All bets are off if the sending server gets hacked anyway; a spammer can send merrily away using the approved from addresses.

Thanks for the replies, everyone; I signed up and will give it a try.

janine