John Dolan, Viant Solutions

Bellsouth is blocking my email

NOTE:  Thanks to Ben Totanes for pointing out that this now applies to all AT&T (att.net) accounts and sbcglobal.net accounts.

I've thought about this a great deal, and I think my initial concerns have proven true.  Taking two companies who were neck and neck in the race for nations worst tech support and merging them was a very bad idea.  This became even more apparent as I was troubleshooting an issue where one of our clients was unable to send email to a specific domain (AT&T's Bellsouth.net domain).

One of our clients recently noticed their messages to BellSouth.net were being delayed and then they received an NDR.  The error messages they received looked like: "This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.  Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, due to being unable to connect successfully to the destination mail server."

There are a few steps you can take to greatly expedite the troubleshooting process:

1)    Check a site like http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx to make sure you are not on a blacklist.

2)    Perform an NSLookup for Bellsouth.net on your mail server.

H:\>nslookup
Default Server:  appserver.local.dcaglobal.com
Address:  10.100.111.2 > set type=mx
> bellsouth.net
Server:  appserver.local.dcaglobal.com
Address:  10.100.111.2

Non-authoritative answer:
bellsouth.net   MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = gateway-f2.isp.att.net
bellsouth.net   MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = gateway-f1.isp.att.net gateway-f2.isp.att.net  internet address = 207.115.11.16
gateway-f1.isp.att.net  internet address = 204.127.217.16

3)    From command prompt attempt a telnet connection to a Bellsouth mail server on port 25 (e.g. telnet 204.127.217.16 25).  Pay attention to the response, if your connection is rejected you are most likely on one of their blacklists.

Good response: 220 isp.att.net - Maillennium ESMTP/MULTIBOX frfwmxc11 #116

Bad Response: 550-65.182.55.3 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=bellsouth,dc=net

550 See http://www.att.net/bls_rbl/ for information.

4)      If you are blocked, send an email to bellsouth_unblock@abuse-att.net including

a.       Originating email domain:

b.      IP Address of mail server

c.       Company name:

d.      Phone Number:

e.       Contact Email:

f.       Time issue was first noticed:

g.      Error received:

h.      Message Header (if you have it):

5)      You can also request they unblock your email address here: http://worldnet.att.net/general-info/bls_info/block_admin.html

This issue took far more time to troublshoot than it should have due to the obscure/misleading NDR message from Bellsouth.  I'm hoping that by posting this I might save a few people a bit of time.

European Vacation

McKenzie and I just got back from an incredible trip to Europe. We went on a 10 day cruise aboard Celebrity’s Century cruise ship. We learned a great deal about Europe on this trip:

· Vacations are exhausting!

· All the good European Museum’s are closed on Monday.

· Viruses spread quickly on cruise ships.

· Being quarantined isn’t all that bad.

· Soap tends to be optional in bathrooms in the larger European cities.

Below is a brief summary of where we went along with a few pictures.

Marseille – Our first visit was to Marseille. We really enjoyed all of the boats (especially the large number of sail boats) in the Vieux Port. The fish market and flower market were also highlights. The Basilique Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde is a beautiful cathedral and had a wonderful view of the city.

Nice/Monaco – Nice is a beautiful, clean city. We walked along the Promenade des Anglais which provides a lovely view of the coast on one side and Nice on the other. From here we made our way to Monaco and hit the Casino. Well, sorta. We walked into the front entrance of Monte Carlo, but decided we didn’t care to pay the $15 admission to see the action on the Casino floor. We left the casion and walked the streets a bit more. Fortunately it was Sunday and so Prada, Versace etc were all closed. My wallet was sure glad I didn’t wave to worry about McKenzie wanting to go there! We walked the streets a bit more. Saw a few more Ferrari’s, Porsche’s and Lamborghini’s before heading back to the cruise ship.

Florence – The one thing McKenzie was truly excited about was seeing the Michelangelo’s statue of David. Well, we hit Florence on a Monday and so all the museum’s were closed, including the Academia were David is. Fortunately we were able to go to Palazzo Vecchio and see a replica of the David in its original location. Here we also saw Bartolomeo Ammannati’s Fountain of Neptune, and Neptune, Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze statue Persius, and so many others. We saw so much here and barely scratched the surface. We look forward to going back to Florence one day!

Rome – This was the highlight of the trip! We spent the morning at the Vatican Museum which was absolutely amazing. I have never seen anything so incredible as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except for possibly The Judgment. Sitting in the Sistine Chapel and attempting to behold the genius of Michelangelo's work was a wonderful and humbling experience.  Raphael's work was also amazing.

From the Vatican we went to The Coliseum and The Forum (see picture). We had a wonderful time enjoying the sites of these historic Roman Ruins. It’s amazing how much is still in place after all these years. Our last stop in Rome was a visit to the Pantheon which is now a Catholic Cathedral. Here we had some authentic Itallian ice which was every bit as good as promised!

Corsica – Unfortuntaely, McKenzie wasn’t able to make it into Corsica with me L She was still quarantined (since I wasn’t actually sick, I was only quarantined for 24 hours). Corsica was a very charming town and I enjoyed walking the streets and doing a bit of shopping. I was hoping to find something fun to bring back to McKenzie on the ship to brighten her day. Unfortunately I struck out. A highlight was having lunch at a café with a view of the Mediterranean. While I was there I saw a school of about 5 tiny Sail boats all tied together with a class of ~10 year old sailors in them, precious!

Valencia – With McKenzie feeling better, we were ready for more exploration! McKenzie and I loved the central market, complete with cows heads, skinned pheasants, and most other animals in whole and part. We also visited a cathedral - Basilica Virgen de los Desamparados. Where did the Catholic church get the money to build all these huge amazing cathedrals?

Gibraltar – Seeing the Rock of Gibraltar, and the tailless apes were certainly the highlights here. We also got to walk through the defense tunnels the English had dug into the Rock of Gibraltar during the Great Siege of Gibraltar in 1779.

Barcelona – With the cruise over, we checked into our hotel and began a day of sight-seeing in Barcelona. I can’t remember the last time I walked so much! My pregnant wife McKenzie was a phenomenal trooper! We walked Las Ramblas, the Gothic center and then walked to the Picasso museum, which was closed. From here we walked to the Gaudi Cathedral. Started in the early 1900’s, it’s still about 50 years from being completed. I have never seen a cathedral quite like this! 

From here it was back to the hotel to get cleaned-up for dinner.  We had to leave the hotel at 4:15 am the next day for our flight home and so we wanted to get an early dinner. After about 1 hour of walking, we found an open restaurant (it was 7 PM at this time). By the time we finished eating more restaurants were beginning to open.

We got a good nights sleep and had an uneventful flight home. We had a wonderful trip to Europe, but it is sure nice to be home from our vacation so we can get some rest!

Knowledge Base – Simple and Secure

When Viant first began, we realized it was critical for us to have a centralized location to store and share information.  This information includes HR forms, client data and the likes.  Initially we used Public Folders in Microsoft Outlook to access this data.  This provided us with a very simple and easy to use location for storing data.

We recently decided to implement SharePoint 2007 to take advantage of the added integration with Office 2007.  This has been a great solution for us.  We only have a handful of document libraries, but those document libraries have made the implementation worth the effort as it has improved accessibility, functionality and search capabilities.  As an added bonus SharePoint Libraries can be synced with Outlook which provides a very convenient way of getting to that data.

What about the secure piece?  There are two components here for us.  One part is the 128 bit encryption provided by IIS.  This ensures all data is kept secure when being transferred over the internet (and of course all network accounts are protected by secure passwords), but we wanted to provide an extra layer of security to our client passwords. To make this happen we took advantage of a password management application called keepass.  We create a separate keepass file for each of our clients and then store that file in a document library.  This still allows us to easily access key client information, but adds an extra layer of security that helps ensure that our secure data stays secure.