mail hosts does not recogize all mailchannels hosts

[ewv]

On 1/20/2021 at 12:16 AM, MarkA said:

Well, nobody gives a hoot about this.  I've spent several hours on it but can't do any more.  SpamCop admin won't state which RFCs are not compliant in the sending configuration headers, if any, and DreamHost doesn't think it's an issue after working with them.  So here we are. It's broken some place but nobody wants to take ownership, see it through and fix it.  SpamCop doesn't work any more with DreamHost.  Glad I didn't renew my paid account here. 

Done.

I discovered that Dreamhost had without telling me changed my email settings to activate incoming spam filtering.  Once I turned that off again the MailChannels problem disrupting spamcop parsing went away because they were no longer interfering with incoming mail.

But MailChannels/Dreamhost causes other problems, including false flagging on outgoing mail leading to false positive spam scores, and it's very difficult to get a response from a competent support person from either finger-pointing company.

A long time ago Dreamhost was very good for flexible email configuration with a shell account.  Over the years they have steadily reduced email service to an inflexible "lowest common denominator" approach, along with recurring devastating failures in service and poor to awful support in response.  Inserting MailChannels disruptions into the mail flow is part of that.  At first, a vps could get around most of it, but even that has been disrupted as Dreamhost VPS has become a restricted VVPS (virtual virtual private server).

It all seems to be part of the trend to replace personal computing with corporate-controlled appliances where you do what you're told as they invade your privacy.

 

 

[Greg C]

After much futzing and experimentation, I think I was able to work around the problem causing:  

"The email sample ... appears to traverse more than one domain"  (on validating [SpamCop] account configuration email)

Host pdx1-sub0-mail-mx210.dreamhost.com (checking ip) IP not found ; pdx1-sub0-mail-mx210.dreamhost.com discarded as fake.
Sorry, SpamCop has encountered errors:
The email sample you submitted for gconnor@nekodojo.org
appears to traverse more than one domain.  
Please ensure that you configure each mailhost individually and in order.

In the headers of the "account configuration email" when submitting them back to Spamcop, I changed this line:

	by pdx1-sub0-mail-mx206.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4T07790vPyz7dnP

and just shortened the fake/internal hostname that Spamcop had the problem with to just "dreamhost.com"

	by dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4T07790vPyz7dnP

This also seemed to work when submitting the spam email for analysis.

My guess here is that "mailchannels.net" receives the mail and then forwards it to "dreamhost.com" but the dreamhost server is configured with an internal name that doesn't exist in DNS.  Dreamhost could probably fix this by configuring Postfix to use a proper DNS name for its "by" lines or just writing "by dreamhost.com"

@Ken Simpson you might not be able to fix this from Mailchannels side but you might have a contact at Dreamhost to help them configure Postfix with real names?

[KelsonV]

On 12/29/2023 at 1:22 PM, Greg C said:

In the headers of the "account configuration email" when submitting them back to Spamcop, I changed this line:

	by pdx1-sub0-mail-mx206.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4T07790vPyz7dnP

and just shortened the fake/internal hostname that Spamcop had the problem with to just "dreamhost.com"

	by dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4T07790vPyz7dnP

This also seemed to work when submitting the spam email for analysis.

Unfortunately this trick didn't work for me, and SpamCop still kicks out the 500 error when I try to submit the test email with all DreamHost hostnames shortened to just the domain.