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If you got spam claiming to be from WSRCC please check out our forged spam page. For info on how we deal with the spam check here.
First of all let us apologize for your bounced email. It is nothing personal, we simply get 30,000 pieces of spam per user per month and have configured our mailer to carefully scrutinize the information that the originating mailer sends. The reason the mail was rejected here was because there was either a problem with your message or an error in the sending side's configuration. You really should get your admin to fix this problem.
In the mean time, if you need to get in contact with us, you can still get mail here by whitelisting yourself. In order to do this, please add the string "+whitelistme@" to your sender address. If your email address is <johndoe@myisp.com> then you should type it as <johndoe+whitelistme@myisp.com>. This self-whitelisting string may be changed from time to time depending on the abuse-level by spammers.
In most cases we automatically whitelist the destination address of any outgoing mail. If you are replying to mail sent to you by a user here, you might want to try replying from the exact same address that we sent the mail to.
What follows is a (hopefully simple English) description of the things your system admin needs to fix to get your mail here unimpeded.
The sending host claimed that it's Internet name was "mailserver". This is not correct. The name MUST be what is called a Fully Qualified Domain Name (or FQDN for short). An example of a correct name response would be "mailserver.yourisp.com".
The sending host claimed a hostname with some invalid characters in it. In this case the "$".
Here the sending host did give a FQDN, but that name didn't really exist in the Domain Name Service (DNS for short). This error happens when the host knows itself by one name but the Internet knows it by another name. The names presented to the internet must be self-consistent.
Here the sending site's DNS administrator forgot to put the name of the host into the DNS system at all. Our system has no way to tell the name of your host. This is probably the most common mistake.
There are two places the DNS administrator has to enter the information for each host. One, the so called "forward mapping" maps the hostname to IP address. Two, the "reverse mapping" maps the IP address to the hostname. Both of these mappings have to agree for our host to believe the information it gets.
or
Here the machine has been identified as a machine that has some significant setup error that has been abused by spammers. The exact technical details can usually be found at the indicated URL. Your admin should rush to fix this problem. If not promptly taken care of the machine will end up on hundreds of private block lists as a spam-site. It will be very difficult and time consuming to locate all of these lists and have your machine removed from them.
Here the sender's email address is in a domain that rejects complaints sent to the abuse mailbox. Send email to your support people and insist that they set up an abuse mailbox, diligently read the complaints and most importantly, promptly kick spammers off.
Here the sender's host is in a domain that rejects complaints sent to the abuse mailbox. (See above.)
Your message has bounced from WSRCC because you have elected to send a message using a mailer (probably Microsoft Outlook) that encodes mail in the HTML (web browser) format. We don't accept HTML-formatted mail.
Here's why: Spammers find HTML an irresistible spam delivery form. It allows them to include in-line pictures (you know the kind we are talking about!) and allows them to see which addresses are "live". When you look at a piece of HTML mail the spammers know you have seen the mail so you are sure to get more mail from them in the future. As a result, we simply don't permit HTML here.
If you need to send pictures, you can still attach them to a mail message as an attachment. That is perfectly fine by us. We just don't want HTML with it's tracking bugs, viruses and in-your-face dirty pictures.
Microsoft Outlook users can turn off HTML by going to the
following menus:
Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Message
Format -> Plain text
More information about turning off your HTML encoding can be found here.
A similar test will also reject any mail with Microsoft-specific binaries (*.exe, *.scr, *.pif, *.exe, *.com, *.bat, *.shs, *.shb, *.vxd, *.rm, *.chm, *.vbs, *.ini, *.cmd, *.do, hta, *.xl, *.reg, *.lnk, *.js, *.jse ). Since we don't have any microsoft systems on-premises we have no need to receive any microsoft viruses, thank-you very much.
Here the user's mailer has been configured to send a non-FQDN address to the Internet. This configuration error is rarely seen in anything but spam.
Here the user's mailer is configured to send an invalid FQDN on the mail. The indicated name simply doesn't exist. This is usually spam. If you are seeing this bounce message you need to check with your site's admin to find the domain name you should be putting on outgoing mail.
The "To:" address that you typed in the header had some
problem. Examples we have seen in the logfile include:
To: <John Doe
jdoe@charlotte.dontspam.wsrcc.com>
instead of:
To: John Doe
<jdoe@charlotte.dontspam.wsrcc.com>
If you retype the address and resend, your mail should be
accepted this time.
This mailer was written in a way that skirts the rules. This method is used exclusively by mailers bought from one of those places selling a CD of A MILLION EMAIL ADDRESSES OF PEOPLE THAT WOULD JUST LOVE TO HAVE THEIR MAILBOX FILLED UP WITH JUNK. Real people should never see this message.
This mailer tried to claim that its name was the name of our machine, presumably in an attempt to trick our mailer into accepting mail it would normally not accept. Real people should never see this message.
The remote mailer tried to claim that this piece of mail originated with a user on our system, yet came from the outside interface. Again the presumtion is that it is attempting to trick our mailer into accepting mail it would normally not accept. Real people should never see this message either.
The sending host had sent us spam in the recent past and that company's abuse department hasn't yet gotten back to us telling us that the spammer's account has been canceled. Please send mail to postmaster here and we will whitelist your email address. If you see this sort of message often when sending mail to various sites you can be sure that your ISP is somewhat lax at keeping its own spamming customers at bay.
In this case the remote site bounced mail to a spam-trap account here. This usually happens when the remote site is incorrectly configured to initially accept all mail and then later returns a "bounce" notification when it determines that there is no such user, or when a spam filter (correctly) identifies this message as spam.
A correctly configured site would decline mail at the SMTP transaction time while it still has the undivided attention of the true sending host. Accepting the mail and sending a bounce message is a good way to annoy some innocent third party if some spammer forged the sender address. At this point we get three thousand of such incorrectly bounced messages per month and it is simply too much. Sites that can't keep their mailer from sending us crap will be automatically blocked until they get their act together.
The mail was sent to an account that doesn't exist. Check for typo's etc.
We are told that certain badly designed mail software will remove the remote side's actual error messages and replace them with information-less generic messages. If you see the above "user unknown" message and you know as a fact that the account really exists, you'll probably need to upgrade your software. Your mailer is lying to you.
Non-spammers should never see this. There is something about the computer or the software that you are using that doesn't look right to our spam detector. We are sorry, but we can't be more specific on this web page without telling the spammers how we detect them. You can try mailing us from a different computer and we will help you work through the issues.
Some Russian spammer has started forging WSRCC addresses in spam sent to Russian addresses. As a result we get quite a few bounces and a smaller number of automatic replies. All of these are in Cyrillic and we have no idea what they say anyway. If you get this bounce and you are complaining about spam please see the forged spam page first. If you still want to talk to us, please send the mail in plain old us-ascii or iso-8859-1.
We get tons of spam encoded in Korean, Chinese and Japanese. This is a complete mystery as to why the spammers think we can even read it. We can't and we wouldn't deal with a spammer even if we could. If you need to mail us, please make sure your mailer is set to encode the message in plain old us-ascii or iso-8859-1.
From time to time we might be forced to change our addresses. If you get such a bounce please resend the message to the new address as indicated.
You'll only see this message if you attempt to deliver email directly from your computer to our computer while bypassing your ISP's mailhost (sometimes referred to as "direct to MX"). Unfortunately too many home users run some virus and bug infested OS (like the garbage from Microsoft). Spammers are constantly looking for abusable machines like these and using them to send their spam from. A substantial part of our spam is now from such machines. As a result we are no longer unable to accept mail directly from customer machines without prior arrangements.
If your ISP assigns you a constant IP address and associated hostname then we will be very happy to whitelist you. If your IP address and hostname are assigned dynamically, then we can still work something else out. Please don't be discouraged. This is (hopefully) a temporary measure until a few big spammers are put in jail and/or Microsoft gets their act together and fixes their security problems.
If some computers you use can't connect to any wsrcc.com host such as the one displaying this web page, then that computer might be filtered at the IP level. Since you are reading this you obviously aren't a spammer, but your network neighbors might well be. Quite a few companies and home users run some highly insecure operation system like the garbage from Microsoft. As a result they often end up relaying spam (or viruses) for professional spammers. We can't tell if they are doing it willingly for a kick-back or because they are dumber than dirt, but the fact remains, we bear the brunt of the 100,000 to 200,000 messages each month that our computer has to sift through. That takes quite a bit of bandwidth. To be quite frank we are getting darn sick of this. As a protective measure any range of 256-adjacent hosts that sends us any spam will cause the whole block of 256 hosts to be blocked for at least 30 days. If your ISP isn't going to force their customers to clean up their act we have to do it from this end the best we can. Please speak to your ISP (or IT staff) in as forceful a language as needed to convey the seriousness of the situation.
There is no need to ask us to white list you. Your machine will automatically be unblocked 30 days after the last spam is seen from that network segment.
Insist that the government start enforcing the CAN-SPAM law and arresting spammers. The current level of spam is outrageous. Let your senators know how you feel!
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wolfgang.rupprecht+web@gmail.com
(Wolfgang S. Rupprecht)
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