Email send to a user with t-online.de address

[cDGo]

On a shared hosting server, one of the users is sending an email to a receiver with a @t-online.de address and got the email bounced back to them, with this message:
H=mx01.t-online.de [194.25.134.72]: SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: 554 IP=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - None/bad reputation. Ask your postmaster for help or to contact [email protected] for reset. (NOWL)

After contacting them, we get a reply that the server IP where the email is send from needs to have a link or redirect to a website which has to show direct contact data of the person responsible for e-mail sent from that system.

so that would mean that when you enter the servers IP adres in the browser, there should be a page presented with the servers owner / contact information.

They say its for:
(*) In case of a malfunction e-mail is not available. Therefore an e-mail address in the system's domain is not suitable for "quick" electronic contact with the person responsible for sending e-mails from this system.

Which ofcourse is a good thing (I think).

I know that when you enter the servers IP, you get a page telling you that "webserver is functioning normally".
Could this page be abused for showing the server owners contact information?
Or is there a beter way of doing it?
Any thoughts about this?
Either a solution or warning against to actually comply?

 

[zEitEr]

Hello,

The default page is located under /var/www/html/index.html and you are free to update the page to redirect and/or show any contact information. Directadmin won't rewrite the page. Of course publicly available contacts can be abused.

You might check this page:

- https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t3

including the section "4.12 Reputation management".

Probably it would help.

I know that when you enter the servers IP, you get a page telling you that "webserver is functioning normally".

 

[Richard G]

so that would mean that when you enter the servers IP adres in the browser, there should be a page presented with the servers owner / contact information.

Yes. It seems t-online.de changed their requirements again not too long ago.
And now at this moment, they have the odd rule, that if you have an unwell configured mailserver (for example no correct PTR), have spammed, or even when you use an ip address which is not used to contact a t-online.de customer for a long time (lets say a year), they even put up an automatic blacklist for such ip. Which is probably what you ran in to.

Previously it was enough to have a correct postmaster and/or abuse address for the server which might be used, but not everybody has configured such address or a lot even don't want to have a look at their root e-mails (stupid but ok, their choice).

So well... for several reasons you can run into this new rules and yes, in that case you do have to provide such page for your ip address even if your mailserver is configured perfectly.
Be aware, it's not only the ip. If your mailserver is contacting with like server.yourserver.com so be sure this corresponds with the ip you're sending your mail from.
Once done you even might have to register by writing to [email protected] so you ip will be whitelisted.
They will do a check and if you don't comply they will not remove your ip from their blacklist c.q. whitelist your ip.

Which ofcourse is a good thing (I think).

No it's not. It's a poor anti spam solution and they can't whitelist all hosting ip's out there. Next to that some people change their hostname, others have multiple ip's they send mail from and so on.
Next to that, it's even a risk of you as hoster getting more spam because your e-mail addres will be on that page, unless you only put your phone number on there, I don't know if that would be enough for them, I doubt it.
As zEitEr already mentioned, public data can be abused.

So it's up to you. They didn't have these rules like 5 years ago, then sending a mail and having a correctly configured mailserver with postmaster address which you could receive mail on was enough. The German's more often have some odd rules.

If I'm correct then @ikkeben has a lot of experience with that as he also works a lot with those mail addresses. However he's already doing business for a long time so most likely he does not have this issue right, but for sure he will know about it.