Great, Shaw is playing with email things again :-(
All of a sudden all emails from my box (on a shaw cable modem) outgoing (via Shaw's recommended smarthost) were being blocked by Shaw. They blocked me from 1am to 4:30pm.
I've been using this setup for 10+ years and never had a problem. They must have switched to a new email outsource service or something.
Even funnier, what triggered it seems to be this: I'm trying to help my customer with Spam problems and the RT ticket he made (and hence email subject) had the word "Spam" and Shaw barfed it back and started the blocking without warning:
========================= Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:07:55 -0500 From: Mail Delivery Subsystem MAILER-DAEMON@tecnopolis.ca Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
The original message was received at Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:07:54 -0500 from localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- customer@mycustomer.com (reason: 552 5.2.0 lWmIYQYgD7S0qlWmJYSEv0 spam rejected)
----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to shawmail.wp.shawcable.net:
DATA
<<< 552 5.2.0 lWmIYQYgD7S0qlWmJYSEv0 spam rejected 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
[...] Subject: [Tecnopolis #2173] Spam Possible =========================
Hahaha. Pathetic. So any email that wants to talk about spam and has that word in the subject is blocked? What if I want to talk about viagra or rolex, is that blocked too?
All subsequent emails for the whole day got a bounce:
========================= The original message was received at Fri, 24 Apr 2015 02:54:59 -0500 from localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- customer@mycustomer.com (reason: 554 mo23.dcs.int.inet shaw.ca ESMTP server not available)
----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to shawmail.wp.shawcable.net: <<< 554 mo23.dcs.int.inet shaw.ca ESMTP server not available 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable =========================
WTF is mo23.dcs.int.inet? Looks new to me.
Anyhow, after a call to a clueless tech rep telling me I'm unsupported because I run sendmail *simply as an outgoing mail MTA pointing directly to their smart host* and an email to their (hopefully) more advanced techs, I got nowhere until it magically fixed itself at 4:30. I probably hit their BL timeout or something.
I dare anyone on the Shaw network using normal SMTP outgoing to send an email with the subject of "sp*m" (I dare not spell it out in full, he who can't be named and all that). Let me know if they block you for a day and whether you get anywhere with tech support.
Shame on Shaw. Almost getting as bad as MTS. Wait a minute, no one can get *that* bad (MS Live mail anyone?). :-)