Verizon - blocking our customers

[jsmall2]

Hi,

I work for an Australian ISP.

We provide services to business customers - which means every one of them has a dedicated, static IP address.

The entire IP address block that we own, appears to be blacklisted by Verizon. Not just one or two addresses, the entire /22 range.

Any of our business customers attempting to send email to users connected with Verizon are greeted with the following bounce:

571 Email from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is currently blocked by Verizon Online's anti-spam system. The email sender or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block. 120716

Needless to say, this hurts both us, and the businses customers of Verizon. The fix seems easy - fill in the form at that address. Unfortunately, doing so doesn't appropriate. Firstly, although the form is entitled "ISP Form", information there isn't really appropriate to an ISP. When being asked to list IP addresses "one at a time, separated by comma", there are 1024 addresses to fill into a short field. List all our domains? How can the ISP list the domain of every customer we service? Likewise for "Do you use SPF" - well some of our customers do and some don't.

Regardless, I have attempted to fill the form in listing one IP of a particular customer, to see if we could at least resolve it for them. Several days later, the following reply came back:

After investigation, Verizon Online Security has determined that e-mail from your IP address will not be allowed access to the Verizon Online e-mail domain due to one or more of the following reasons:

Your IP has been blocked because of spam issues or because your ISP indicates that it is dynamically assigned

No Reverse Hostname associated with your IP address.

Since the form doesn't specify, we can respond to each of these issues individually:

• Spam issues: We have an absolutely zero tolerance approach to this, and have never had a single IP address of ours  show up on any of the public blacklists because of this.
• ISP indicates it is dynamically assigned: We are the ISP, and we were never asked. Verizon don't seem interested in communicating to us about this.
• No reverse hostname: Provably untrue.

So where do we go from here? Several of our staff have made multiple attempts at contacting Verizon technical support, and international calls spanning over an hour have been pretty common recently. The end result is always someone sending us off to that same form. Attempting to visit the above issues always gets explained away with the advice that filling in the online whitelist form will resolve the issue.

We have asked to be escalated to higher level technicians or managers, and always been refused.

As the ISP, several of those complaints don't seem appropriate. If there was doubt as to whether the IP was dynamic, I would be the one to answer it. None of the public blacklists which officially list dynamic records list any of ours.

The form has no fields for any sort of "comment", and simply filling in the form again results in serveral days of delay followed by the same canned response, as it has over multiple occasions.

Emails to support addresses, whitelist@ and abuse@ all go unanswered.

We run a professional system, the reputation lists for Senderbase, Return Path and Barracuda list us with "Good" reputation on every IP in our range. Our customers can't understand the blacklisting and obviously neither can we.

Any help on this would be appreciated. We've bounced back and forth on this for roughly two weeks at this point and burnt countless hours attempting to get someone from Verizon to allow their customers to communicate with us.

[somegirl]

Do your customers send from email servers on their own networks, or do they use a dedicated SMTP server provided by your company? If they are using your server, then you need to be providing the server's ip address, not the customer's, since that is what is being blocked.

You have wisely blanked out the IP address listed in the bounceback message, but that is the IP address that needs to be entered in the whitelist form. The information provided again needs to be about your mail server, not your customer's individual settings.

[jsmall2]

Hi,

Our customers send mail from their own networks.

Every one of them has a dedicated server with a firewall appliance preventing undesireable outbound email.

Before we get asked to reengineer our network so that all our customers relay through a central server (this was suggested to me), I'd like to point out that we do offer a mail relay that we haven't been able to get off the Verizon blacklist either.

Across the many times I've filled in this form I've filled in all sorts of details, including one just for the mail server our own organisation uses.

Of course we have filled it in with the exact IP in the bounce backs.

Same canned response comes back. I don't believe a human is reading it - there's a computer behind the processing of this form and it's broken. As discussed above, incorrect responses about "dynamic addresses" come back.

Filling in this form for ONE address is ignorant of the fact we are an ISP with a large range IP addresses.

Anyone can look up the DNS MX record of a business - their IP address isn't exactly hidden.

Edit: is it really the intention that we fill in this form over 1000 times so that over 1000 customers are not blacklisted?

[jsmall2]

Update - more long, circular phone calls to people who transfer, ring 30 minutes more and disconnect.

Noone will give me a case number or allow me to talk to a manager.

Still trying to work on this.

[Hubrisnxs]

for that type of a problem i would try the verizon twitter support.  they are more adept at that sort of thing, plus hate the bad press  :[

twitter.com/verizonsupport

[jsmall2]

Just to update people on this.

One of our technicians logged a Twitter complaint. They were quickly contacted by a technician who stated they can see the issue and would resolve it, but that went stale and we haven't had a response for several days.

It is believed through various means that this has been confirmed as an out of date bogon list - I can't find a way to comment on this whilst remaining professional.

Currently, we're running over a month of complaints from our customers that they cannot communicate with Verizon customers.

[Hubrisnxs]

If it's an out of date bogon filter on the verizon side then you should do a quick whois and email their noc.

That would be the correct place to send a bogon filter correection update.  Something to the affect of "it appears that there is a possible out of date bogon preventing xyz,  please update to include x.x.x.0 subnet.   To me that seems a little older of an email address, so maybe do a who is of your own and see what you come up with for a noc email 

IPNMC@gnilink.net

hopefully the customers are all on the same subnet.

[jsmall2]

>  If it's an out of date bogon filter on the verizon side then you should do a quick whois and email their noc

We did this over a month ago, and followed it up with multiple subsequent emails.

Noone has ever replied.

[Hubrisnxs]

try getting back to the twitter guy then with the same direction.  start moving away from the whitelisting, and moving towards having them get a message to their network tech's and in turn this ipnmc group that appears as the noc center, maybe even try calling in again.    there is also a 

Verizon Direct

forum that is manned by these network tech's from what i understand.  

[Shamika_VZ]

Good Morning,

This issue was handled privately. If you still need further assistance, please let us know.

Shamika_Vz
Verizon Support

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