I, nor anyone else on NANOG received notification either. All of us
dealt with SPAM complaints efficiently & effectively in the past and
were not listed in RBL/DNSBL when our access to MSN was revoked.
I'll go into lengths about what was done so that everything can be found
in the Exim archives and in case anyone else is having these issues as
well:
My initial email to MSN (abuse/postmaster/NOC):
This will help diagnose whether or not you have the same issues as I
did. Be sure you're not running into an MTU related issue before
crawling down Microsoft's throat.
===================================================================
One of our mail servers is experiencing connectivity issues with one of
your mail servers when attempting to relay mail to users @msn.com
My MTA is outputting the following:
Connecting to smtp-gw-4.msn.com [207.46.181.13.25] ... connected
LOG: 0 MAIN
Remote host smtp-gw-4.msn.com [207.46.181.13] closed connection after
initial connection
LOG: 0 MAIN
== katelyn34@??? T=remote_smtp defer (-19): Remote host
smtp-gw-4.msn.com [207.46.181.13] closed connection after initial
connection
Upon further investigation:
root@server18 [~]# telnet 207.46.181.13 25
Trying 207.46.181.13...
Connected to 207.46.181.13.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
It appears as though your mail server is prematurely ending the
connection. I was able to successfully connect the abovementioned mail
server from a few of our other servers. One example below:
staff:~# telnet 207.46.181.13 25
Trying 207.46.181.13...
Connected to 207.46.181.13.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 cpimssmtpa52.msn.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version:
5.0.2195.4453 ready at Tue, 28 Jan 2003 13:36:58 -0800
From the above, the mail connectivity issues are on your end.
That of course yielded no results as no one seems to be home at
Microsoft or knew how to resolve the connectivity issues. I eventually
called the tier 3 technical support number at MSN to file a trouble
ticket, they can be reached at: 877.606.9433 You can reference my
ticket number, which is 103316949. This is an appropriate route to
take, however it may take upwards of 2 weeks to have the issue resolved.
I then received a response back from abuse@??? saying that
they were going to look into the issue. Ticket number which you may
want to reference is CST103178394ID; others who had exactly the same
issues have ticket numbers CST102171292ID and CST103362434ID.
I finally received a reply back from my tier 3 ticket (which migrated
into a new ticket number: SR# 1-6AAF04 20030212) and said the issue was
resolved--which was true.
If after all of the above fails, I have two contacts at the MSN NOC
which you can contact. However be sure to include a very detailed
explanation of your issue, but be sure to check any attitude at the door
and include all of your ticket numbers and those of others. If you'd
like, you can reference my sr. support ticket number from above: SR#
1-6AAF04 20030212
Tom Putnam :: msnianoc@???
Matt Allred :: v-mattal@???
In my experience with this MSN issue, they only restricted access to
specific IPs rather than entire netblocks. A temporary solution for me
was to route all mail to another mail server, I then altered the eth0 on
the Linux rig having issues and that "resolved" the issue.
If you have any questions, feel free to fire them my way.
