Posts Tagged ‘Anti-Spam’

Incident report: Some mails to Microsoft online services was getting blocked..

Posted on: February 13th, 2025 by

This afternoon earlier today one of the Kolab Now MX servers was listed on the Microsoft block list. This means that some users might have seen, that mails sent to recipients at ‘@outlook.com’, ‘@live.com’, ‘@hotmail.com’, and other Microsoft online services was bounced back with the message that looks something like this:

This is the mail system at host mx.kolabnow.com. 
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not 
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. 
For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster. 
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can 
delete your own text from the attached returned message. 
The mail system <some-email@outlook.com>: host  
outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[x.x.x.x] said: 550 5.7.1 
Unfortunately, messages from [y.y.y.y] weren't sent. Please contact 
your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block 
list (S3150). You can also refer your provider to 
http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors. [Name=Protocol 
Filter Agent][AGT=PFA][MxId=<some long number>] 
[SG2PEPF03345FBECA.apcprd05.prod.outlook.com 2025-02-13T<timestamp>Z 
<another long number>] (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

Although the listing was fast discovered, Microsoft was contacted and the listing is reversed as soon as it is possible, it took a while. At this time emails should be delivered to the Microsoft online services.

A few users has misinterpreted the symptoms with error messages from missing the DKIM changes made on Monday (please read this blog post from December 2024 and the follow ups). If you are a group manager, then please make sure that you have the new DKIM related CNAMES added to your DNS zone.

If you have any questions or concerns in this context, then please contact support.

Incident report: Spool overflow filling up disk..

Posted on: July 2nd, 2024 by

On Monday 2024-07-01 early evening (CEST) a spammer attempted to use a Kolab Now account for sending out large amounts of spam. The Kolab Now exit spam filter was sorting out the spam and redirecting it, as it was supposed to do, and none of the spam was sent out. The spammer was however stubborn and kept up the sending, which subsequently was filling up a disk and hence blocking traffic. Due to ongoing maintenance on the monitoring, the full disk was unfortunately not discovered until Tuesday morning, when the problem was immediately corrected, and queued mails were again flowing in both directions.

The problem caused a group of users (about 30%) to be unable to receive mail, and sent mail was queued until the space was again freed up and spooling was possible. No mail should have been lost during the incident.

The missing monitoring has been put back into action, and the Kolab Now Engineering team is evaluating changes that will prevent the situation from repeating.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this incident may have caused.

Announcing Service Window: Updates to Kolab..

Posted on: July 29th, 2021 by

This Saturday, 31st of July 2021 at 08:00 UTC, the Kolab Now operations team will perform an update of the Kolab dashboard software on the Kolab Now platform.

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Rate Limits Are A Thing Now

Posted on: April 15th, 2019 by

We’ve been dealing with quite a number of spammers whom register accounts with us, and start spamming third parties.

As you might imagine, our environment is geared toward redundancy and load-balancing and high traffic — hundreds of messages, thousands of recipients, every minute. The capabilities of our infrastructure are therefore in and by itself not limiting the rate at which anyone can send any number of messages to any number of recipients.

But, this is the case no longer per se.

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Do not click the link..

Posted on: December 28th, 2018 by

A phishing mail has been sent to some Kolab Now customers. Our Support team was alerted by observant and attentive users, and our Operations team was able to take preventive action before the mail was spread more widely.> Continue Reading

Junk Email Filter.com is Junk

Posted on: October 16th, 2017 by

We’re dropping our use of junkemailfilter.com “Spam DNS Lists”, because we have few positive experiences with it. Frankly, it is Junk.

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