NinerNet Communications™
System Status

Server and System Status

Email messages from Xneelo (formerly Hetzner South Africa) senders blocked

19 January 2024 01:23:15 +0000

We’ve been meaning to post about this for several years (since 2020), but we haven’t because there’s always something more important to do and it’s not our job to highlight how badly a competitor is running their mail servers. However, after the issue had gone away for a time we thought that perhaps Xneelo (formerly Hetzner South Africa) had resolved their problem. But now it’s back.

The problem is that one of the multiple mail servers they run is in multiple anti-spam blacklists/blocklists. We don’t know how many outbound mail servers they run, but let’s say (for the sake of example) it’s ten. If the IP address of one of those servers is in a blacklist, and all of their outbound mail is equally spread among those ten servers, then 10% of their outbound messages will not be delivered to anyone that is using the blacklists in which that server is listed.

The problem for us is that we end up devoting a significant percentage of our support resources to answering questions from clients who don’t understand what is going on, and who think that we are the problem. But we’re not!

Getting into an anti-spam blacklist is a significant event for any company, but the bigger you are and the more servers you run the less of an issue it is. NinerNet is not big, and so if one of our servers gets into a blacklist it’s a big deal, and we jump around to fix the problem and have our IP address removed from the blacklist. Considering how long one of Xneelo’s mail servers has been in a major blacklist, and how many of their clients we (or our clients) have told to take the problem to Xneelo, it’s shocking to us that they don’t seem to have done a thing about it. So we’re making this blog post to try and bring their attention to it publicly and to point our clients here whenever they have a question about the problem.

If one of your correspondents tells you that their email messages to you are not getting through to you, and they’re a Xneelo customer, this is almost certainly the reason. Your correspondent — the Xneelo client — needs to go to Xneelo to demand that Xneelo resolve their years-old problem in order to serve their own clientele properly.


Update, 2024-03-01: A Xneelo client that was failing to correspond with one of our clients engaged Xneelo support on 28 February 2024, and we are in ongoing discussions with Xneelo for them to fix this problem. Xneelo have acknowledged that at least two of their outgoing mail servers (197.189.244.82 and 197.189.244.90) are in six blacklists between them, so the situation is actually far worse than the hypothetical example given above. When the issue is resolved we will post an update here.

Update, 2024-03-05: Almost a week later and Xneelo are still spouting excuses and fabrications, and assuming that the people they are addressing (including us!) are too stupid to understand how email works. This may or may not be resolved at some point, but at this point it seems it likely won’t be. Email service providers should cooperate with one another to reduce spam across the Internet, and they should communicate truthfully with one another, but that seems to be too much of a challenge for Xneelo. We’d love to run our mail servers without having to consult blacklists of spammers, but your email account would become instantly useless if we did. All we can suggest you do is to advise your correspondents to use email hosting providers that take care of the reputations of their IP addresses, as otherwise their email will be tainted with the same negative reputation. This is how the combined actions of hosting clients are supposed to drive the bad actors out of business.

Update, 2024-03-14: It has emerged that Xneelo doesn’t even handle greylisting properly! One of the parties involved in the ticket with Xneelo decided to communicate with us directly (to become a client, ironically), but because Xneelo’s mail servers don’t respond correctly to NinerNet’s use of the well-established anti-spam technique greylisting, their messages to us are now bouncing! Apparently this client of Xneelo has done the right thing and told Xneelo that they will be moving their hosting business away if they don’t fix the problem. It blows us away how badly Xneelo is running their mail servers!

Update 2, 2024-03-14: We have added various IP addresses, server names and domains to various whitelists on our mail servers. Adding the blacklisted IP address will not have any effect on messages from Xneelo’s blacklisted servers that are listed in the blacklists our anti-spam system consults, but these additions are, as far as we can tell so far, having a positive effect on Xneelo’s inability to handle greylisting. If you communicate with a South African correspondent who is hosted by Xneelo and their emails to you are bouncing or taking hours to come through, please log into the mail server control panel and add their domain at Domains and Accounts -> YOUR_DOMAIN -> Greylisting -> Do not apply greylisting on listed senders. If your correspondent is susie@example.com, you need to add “@example.com” (with the leading @ symbol) to that text box, and click the green “Save changes” button.

NC036: Mail server disk space issue

15 October 2021 11:34:08 +0000

Server NC036 (the primary mail server) briefly ran out of disk space on Friday 15 October at 11:02 UTC. This was immediately rectified, and the server was running normally again at 11:10.

This is the reason for this weekend’s scheduled maintenance. This problem won’t happen again after the maintenance. We apologise for this temporary problem.

If you have any questions, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

NC036: Emails to Hotmail/Outlook being redirected

22 May 2020 07:03:49 +0000

Some clients may have had emails they sent to Hotmail, Outlook and other Microsoft email service domains bounced in the last 24 hours. This is because the primary mail server’s IP address has been blacklisted by Microsoft, despite our being enrolled in their “Junk Mail Reporting Program”. Our being enrolled is supposed to result in our being informed of spam complaints (which are overwhelmingly false) before our IP address is blacklisted, but their system seems to have been broken for the last few years.

Until we can get in touch with Microsoft support to have our IP address removed, or until our listing expires, we are automatically directing all email to their domains through our relay server, which is not blacklisted.

If you had an email bounced, please resend it. Thank-you, and sorry for the hassle. If you have any questions please contact NinerNet support.

NC036: Migration update 23 — SMTP AUTH is required for users under this sender domain

11 June 2018 09:38:23 +0000

There are two reasons why you may be getting the above error in response to messages you’ve sent to addresses on domains hosted by NinerNet, likely your own domain:

  • It may be because you’re sending from an address on a domain that we host, but instead of sending your email through our SMTP server (smtp.niner.net) you’re sending through another SMTP server, possibly that of an ISP or another email service provider. In some cases this can happen because of a situation similar to that described in the sixth bullet point of our post “NC036: Migration update 20 — Solutions“, where you’ve sent the email through a third party, perhaps an ISP, or an email account you have with another provider.
  • If you’re using some cloud-hosted application that tries to send email to you as you (or another user on your own domain), then that email looks like spam to the mail server, because lots of spammers mistakenly try to get their email through by sending their spam from your email address to your email address, or from another address on your own domain to you.

The solutions are, respectively (and respectfully):

  • Configure your email program to use smtp.niner.net to send email from any domain that we host. If you’re following the configuration instructions we send you, then that is the case by default, and always has been.
  • Have the provider of the cloud service send those emails from an address — even a “no-reply” address — on their own domain, or use SMTP AUTH to send the email through smtp.niner.net from an address on your own domain, just as you or any other human with an address on your domain would.

NinerNet home page

Systems at a Glance:


Loc.SystemStatusPing
Server NC023, London, United Kingdom (Relay server), INTERNAL.NC023InternalUp?
Server NC028, Vancouver, Canada (Monitoring server), INTERNAL.NC028InternalUp?
Server NC031, New York, United States of America (Web server), INTERNAL.NC031InternalUp?
Server NC033, Toronto, Canada (Primary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC033OperationalUp?
Server NC034, Lusaka, Zambia (Phone server), INTERNAL.NC034InternalUp?
Server NC035, Sydney, Australia (Secondary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC035OperationalUp?
Server NC036, Amsterdam, Netherlands (Mail server), OPERATIONAL.NC036OperationalUp?
Server NC040, Toronto, Canada (Web server), INTERNAL.NC040InternalUp?
Server NC041, New York, United States of America (Web server), OPERATIONAL.NC041OperationalUp?
Server NC042, Seattle, United States of America (Status website), OPERATIONAL.NC042OperationalUp?

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