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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that Hetzner has a rather lax (non-existing?) policy when it comes to stopping outbound spam, so make sure to check that IPs you get from them are not on MX blacklists.

To clarify - saying this as someone who was forced to blacklist their IPs on more than one occassion, not as someone who ran into tainted IPs as their customer.

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From my experience this is false. Hetzner reacts to abuse notices and I never received a server with blacklisted IP addresses.

The only organization that caused issues is Microsoft / Outlook.com, but they seem to block every IP address by default. I was able to unblock myself by filling out a form and waiting a few hours for all my servers so far.

They do react to notices, but they don't do much about them.

Emailing abuse@hetzner.de yields:

    Dear Sir or Madam,
    
    Thank you for your email.
    
    In order for us to process your request, we ask that you 
    please fill out the form at the following link:
    
    https://abuse.hetzner.de/
    
    Please use this form for all future complaints.
    
    Kind regards
    Abuse team

When told that they already have all the information in the original report, a human suddenly appears and replies that apparently every report needs to include a permission to be forwarded to the customer. Again, in the context of a clearly compromised box one would expect them to first block the box and then "follow up with the customer."

Still, even with this permission and several hours in, the box is still spamming, customer is "investigating" and Hetzner has done all they could to handle this incident.

Would much rather have them investigate first, so you can't just abuse spam reports to shut down people's servers.

FWIW: I block Hetzner.

They have an automated abuse-handling system that sends your complaint to the spammer and asks them politely to stop. This often works for small-time operation on a single IP address, and for compromised servers, but it's completely inadequate for dealing with large customers and rogue resellers spamming over large netblocks, and against darker-coloured-hat spammers engaging in reprisals.

Replying to the automated mails can get you through to a human, but their ops are stuck on a limited script so they're not really any more use than the automated systems. They have no interest in investigating wider patterns of abuse than a single spam from a single IP.

I regret having to blacklist but it's not worth the time and frustration of trying to engage with them.

Considering you said you also block Amazon, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494970, I don’t think your opinion will have much weight on this topic.

I don't aspire to weight, but I don't really know what you're getting at here - amazonses is commonly blocked as its abuse reporting is a brick wall, much worse than Hetzner who are at least trying, if ineffectively.

(Not talking about all of Amazon, just SES - AWS for example is a different animal.)

Considering how many legitimate services are on SES, if you block SES you might as well go with a whitelist for email.

That’s what I’m trying to get at here.

Beating spam by playing whack-a-mole is a dead end, that ship sailed long, long ago.

Same here.

I've used Hetzner for two years and I never had any issue regarding blacklisted Ip addresses.

Was that a form by Microsoft? Would be great if you could share that, I’ve been looking for something like this forever!

Yes. You can find Hetzner's ( ;) ) explanation here: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Microsoft_Blacklist/en.

It's the first link in the delisting section: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866&clcid

I also recommend signing up for SNDS.

So cool, thanks a lot. I asked the Microsoft support twice, they didn’t even understand my problem!

To report a false positive blacklisting to Outlook.com:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/getsupport?oaspworkflow=...

Check your /24 neighborhood first though, one of your neighbors might be sending spam:

https://www.talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup

I'm using a Hetzner VPS to host my mail for nearly 8 years now. Never had a single problem with blacklisting. I once lost IPv6 connection because of a routing mistake on their side but that was it.

We hardly see spam from Hetzner Germany.

We have also had good experience with Hetzner South Africa's abuse department.

We do see plenty of spam from OVH however. On one occasion when we reported several IPs to them for sending Russian spam, they did not reply.

Not my experience.

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