Spamhaus time out notification

Maintenance
1

Symptom: Automatic MIAB status email indicates spam blacklists timeouts. What are timeouts?

What I did to troubleshoot:

  • I tested sending/receiving email between my email at example dot com and my gmail account which succeeded.
  • I went to the URL’s listed in the email to check statuses but they showed no issue.
  • System Status Check is all green.

Is there anything more i should do or be concerned about? This is the first time in about a years operation I’ve seen anything like this. System Status Check is all green.

Thanks very much
Steve.

Email I got:

System – Currently:

✓ System software is up to date.

Network – Previously:

✓ IP address is not blacklisted by zen dot spamhaus dot org.

Network – Currently:

:heavy_multiplication_x: The IP address of this machine at is listed in the Spamhaus Block List (code [timeout]), which may prevent recipients from receiving your email. See http://www dot spamhaus dot org/query/ip/

box dot example dot com – Previously:

✓ Domain is not blacklisted by dbl dot spamhaus dot org.

box dot example dot com – Currently:

:heavy_multiplication_x: This domain is listed in the Spamhaus Domain Block List (code [timeout]), which may prevent recipients from receiving your mail. See http://www dot spamhaus dot org/dbl/ and http://www dot spamhaus dot org/query/domain/box dot example dot dot com.

example dot com – Previously:

✓ Domain is not blacklisted by dbl dot spamhaus dot org.

example dot com – Currently:

:heavy_multiplication_x: This domain is listed in the Spamhaus Domain Block List (code [timeout]), which may prevent recipients from receiving your mail. See http://www dot spamhaus dot org/dbl/ and http://www dot spamhaus dot org/query/domain/example dot com.

2

In this particular case, it is indicating that MiaB was connecting to get more information to present to you and that connection timed out.

Your greater issue though is that you are on this blacklist and should take the steps to be removed.

3

Alento,

Thank you for your response.

You said my greater issue was I’m on a blacklist, but I don’t understand that. As I noted originally, following the url to spamhaus shows my domain as “unlisted”. Ordinarily, this would seem a false positive, but I’ll wait for your comment. Tks very much!

4

I disagree with the assessment from @alento. I am pretty sure this is a false positive.

As you already stated the system status check is green again, indicating that you are not blacklisted on the Spamhaus list.

But this is definitely misleading and I will create a new issue on Github, so maybe we can adjust the message to be less misleading if there is a timeout :slight_smile:

(For technical details: We want the spamhaus status to be None, but since it is “[timeout]” the status checker assumes that you are blacklisted.)

5

I agree that the error message is misleading in this case and pushed a fix at https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/pull/1817. In my experience, these lists tend to time out sometimes. Spamhaus less than others. For those that don’t know it: https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx is a nice tool to check against a few of these lists and also receive email notifications once a status changes.

6

Thanks hija and fspoettel for your responses and efforts to clarify.

I will treat this one time issue for me as a false positive, but still continue to monitor the Status Updates.

Looking forward to using MIAB for a long time!

Regards,
Steve.

7

I’ve seen this a few times on my Vultr hosted instance recently. I know based on the activity of my MiAB instance that there’s nothing sending to have put us on the Spamhaus blocklist. Warning went away after a day on .47 earlier this week. I just updated to .48 thinking this might be an item it resolves but saw it again on the Vultr instance again just after update. Not seeing it on Linode or DO being maintained at same time.

Also verified immediately on https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx that we are OK against 87 lists including Spamhaus ZEN

8

You’re right … I misread the OP. However the assessment of the actual problem was spot on. At the time the MiaB was making the request to check the blacklist it timed out. There was no mistake in that.

I see that a fix was pushed as indicated here: