This has been a bad week for my email. Earlier this week, one of my domain names was "Joe Jobbed" (my domain name used as a fake return address) by a spammer selling Viagra. Countless bounced emails from ISPs saying "User Unknown" flooded my inbox. I can only imagine how many uninformed spam recipients simply blocked my domain altogether, rather than properly reporting the spam and it's REAL sender to services like SpamCop.net.
My email woes do not end there. Yesterday I sent an email to a friend with a Yahoo.com email address. To my surprise it was bounced back saying my mail server was blocked. (In other words, the IP block of my ISP was being listed in a so-called "black hole" listing of spam-friendly open relay servers.) The problem, my ISP is... you guessed it... SBC Yahoo. Let me make this perfectly clear:
Yahoo has blocked it's own mail server.
Granted, it's through SBC Yahoo, but it's still the same company. (All of my ISP email is handled via Yahoo, not SBC, etc.) Not surprisingly, email to Yahoo has yielded no help. As it stands now, I could not even send email to myself, as my outgoing mail server would be blocked by my incoming mail server.
Many have asked: Is Email Doomed?
My answer: Yes.
