blacklisted!

Well, Google is slow from Africa today, so I'll just send this along to
the blog by email. Email is a lot older than the fancy-pants slick
interfaces at blogger.com, facebook.com, gmail.com and such. It was
created back when all anyone had was a slow connection, by today's
standards. And it's pretty old. The internet itself was born the same
year I was, the year of the moon landing, and the release of Abbey
Road. Man, are we ever old, the internet and me. At least I work a lot
better in Yaounde than the internet does. And email is even older than
the internet; it dates back to sometime in the mid-sixties, and started
out on timesharing computer systems as a way for users to communicate
with each other. But the "@" symbol for addresses was added only in 1971.

We're having a particular problem here at the office with email.
RELUFA's domain is relufa.org, and it's hosted at a US company that
outsources their email to some vast impersonal email company somewhere.
Christi, whose house we live in right now, is in the US and can send
email fine from her relufa.org address. But Valery and the other users
here in the office in Yaounde cannot. After some email exchanges with
our US hosting company, it turns out that our email here at the office
is blocked because lots of spam comes from this part of the world. So
relufa.org email accounts are fine, but they won't let work from here.
I can't imagine trying to set up a business in Yaounde; the fees to do
so are apparently prohibitively high, the internet runs at a trickle
(unless, presumably, you have enough money to buy a satellite connection
like our friends at SIL), and your email is verboten. RELUFA's
microloan program encourages small-scale entrepreneurs, but they are so
small they escape all these impediments.

The following is the email exchange between me and some guy somewhere in the US about this email problem, captured here for the technically
curious and for posterity, when I print this whole blog off as a book.
(Which I would pay blogger for, if I could do it automatically, the way
Apple lets you do with pictures. Maybe someone will invent that while
we're away. Printmyblog.com or similar. Update: OK, I just alt-tabbed
over to my Firefox browser and tried www.printmyblog.com, and sure
enough, someone has that name registered, proof that if you can think of
something, someone out there on the internet has probably given it a try.)

*****

[Here's my initial request for help]

I am a volunteer helping relufa.org, and I'm trying to resolve an error sending email via the account xxxxx@relufa.org. The user, Valery, showed me his error message using your webmail interface. It says "The address yyyyy@gmail.com was rejected for the following reason: Sorry, you cannot send mail from your ISP due to a high abuse complaint rate." This error occurred when Valery logged into his relufa.org account to send mail via your webmail interface. He was trying to send mail to my gmail account. We are located in Yaounde, Cameroon. One relufa.org user is in the USA and does not have this problem. Please advise.

*****


[Their first response. I don't think they read my note very carefully.]

I'm not certain that I understand the issue. There are two ways to interface with the email system: (1) software such as Outlook or (b) http://mail.relufa.org. I believe you're saying you use http://mail.relufa.org. I logged into the account xxxxx@relufa.org and was able to send email. I am located in the United States.

Are you saying that because you're outside of the US, you think that's the problem? Are you blocked from sending email to everyone or just to a Gmail account? Did this error appear at http://mail.relufa.org or was it a bounce message from Gmail?

Chris, since this isn't your account I certainly cannot provide you with access to the account but I'd like to understand the problem.

*****

[Here's my second attempt to explain the problem, with exciting details on how to reproduce it.]

To produce the problem, xxxxx@relufa.org does the following:

1. log into webmail account at http://mail.relufa.org (NOT using Outlook)

2. attempt to send mail to anyone (we tried yyyyy@gmail.com, other relufa.org accounts, others)

3. webmail interface returns an error after send that says "The address yyyyy@gmail.com [or whatever] was rejected for the following reason: Sorry, you cannot send mail from your ISP due to a high abuse complaint rate."

We are also unsuccessful using Outlook. We used webmail in order to establish that Outlook configuration is not the issue.

We are located in Yaounde, Cameroon. Another relufa.org user is successfully sending mail from the United States, so the problem may be our location. The problem is not rejection from the email recipient, since we get the same error sending to several different domains.

Please advise.

*****

[The bad news begins -- here's their response.]

>From everything you describe, and from the testing we are doing, the problem seems to be somehow related to the ISP you are using in Camaroon and it appears that your ISP has a high rate of spam and is being blocked. We outsource our email to a very large email service. It's a national Holiday in the United States today and I may need to wait until Monday to contact them to see if they know of a solution to the problem.

*****

[Now, this morning, after the weekend, more bad news. Our internet service provider here in Yaounde is indeed blocked by the anonymous people our email service is outsourced to. Here's their followup message.]

>

I just got off the telephone with the email service to whom we outsource our email. They are 100% positive that the error message isn't coming from their service. They way that many IP addresses in Camaroon and certain other countries are blacklisted because of high levels of SPAM. He said that your only recourse was to contact the ISP in Camaroon and see if they can get the blacklist removed for your IP address. He also told me that doing that was going to be a long process at best. I'm sorry that I don't have a better answer for you.

*****

[It just gets worse after this. Here's the last one from them.]

I was given more information about your attempting to send the email from Cameroon. I was informed that your IP address closely matched one Nigeria which is a hot-spot for SPAM email and that's why there's a block on the IP address. As I said before, there's nothing we can do.

I'm sure these people were told where we were when we set up the account. Tant pis.