Question

I’m hosting a client site on heroku. The client is pointing their custom-domain-name (A-record) to one of the public IPs of heroku. Now, my client contacted me and complained that their emails are being rejected by one of their biggest clients due to a sbl-listing of the same IPs on http://www.spamhaus.org ( http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL107993 ). Now the spammer is some url-shortener and has nothing to do with my clients business.

I did a lot of searches on google, but found little. Just that the problems have to do with shared IPs. But what is the solution? And as heroku is hosting big applcations there must be others having the same issue? Or is there one simple trick to solve this?

Cheers
Nick

Answer 1

Have the same problem, no simple trick here. Here is Heroku’s support response to the matter :

We’re working with Spamhaus to get our
IPs removed from their lists. They’ve
proven to be very difficult to work
with and don’t always remove IPs even
when complying with their terms.

The root of the problem is with mail
providers having misconfigured SPAM
filters. You’ll want to follow up with
any mail providers that are flagging
your emails as SPAM and ask them to
adjust their filters as to not flag
legitimate emails as SPAM. We’ll
continue to work with Spamhaus to get
these IPs removed but it’s best to
make this a two front effort.

As a work around if you use hostname
SSL we’ll provide you with a new
hostname to point your domain to. This
will disassociate your domain with the
3 listed IPs.

Reference

Our link from Spamhaus : http://www.spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL107992

Summary

• See if your recipient has mis-configured SPAM filters
• Wait for Heroku to fix the problem

Update

Heroku support says it may take weeks to resolve the issue.