E-mail Policies

 

Effective March 3rd, 2014

The Bitworks is committed to maintaining your confidence and trust in us, our products, and our Web site. To that end, we are providing this notice, which explains our practices regarding the security, filtering and acceptance of e-mail messages through servers owned and operated by The Bitworks Inc.  If your frustrated with our spam blocking please read or latest spam rant.

Acceptance of this E-mail Policy

By sending e-mail through our servers you agree to the terms and conditions of this policy. Without limitation of the foregoing, you understand and agree that (a) e-mail messages sent through The Bitworks servers may be stored indefinitely, (b) The Bitworks may store, access and use the information in any jurisdiction, including jurisdictions in which the privacy laws may be different and less protective than those in your home jurisdiction, and (c) The Bitworks may collect, process and use this information internally for a variety of purposes. Please do not send e-mail messages through our servers if you do not agree to the terms and conditions of this policy. The Bitworks reserves the right to change this E-mail Policy at any time. If we do so, we will post any changes on our Web site.

What is necessary to send e-mail through The BitWorks servers?

In general, following best practices for configuring secure, reliable and RFC compliant e-mail servers will insure the acceptance of e-mail by our servers and subsequent delivery to our hosted domains. The following is a brief, but not necessarily complete list of requirements that will insure the delivery of e-mail through our servers:

  • Insure that your domain, server or IP address is not listed in any spam e-mail databases.
  • We do not accept e-mail from spam database listed domains.
  • We do not accept e-mail from servers connected via a dial-up connection.
  • We do not accept e-mail from servers whose reverse DNS entry includes the words dynamic, pool, dialup
  • We do not accept e-mail from certain areas of the world known to be origins of spam (we will pre-authorize a valid sender however, please contact us)
  • Insure that your e-mail server is operating in an RFC compliant mode.
  • Insure that your e-mail server has a working, resolvable reverse DNS entry.
  • Insure that your e-mail server has an RDNS entry that is NOT a generic provider address.
  • Verify your information, insuring you are sending to a valid e-mail address hosted by our servers.

We recommend using the dnstools at DNSStuff.com to test your domain.

Links to Other Web sites

Links from our web site are provided for your convenience. The BitWorks is not responsible for the content of any third party Web site or the privacy practices of such third parties.

Questions or Whitelisting

If you have any questions or concerns about this policy or would like your domain or server whitelisted, please e-mail us at info@thebitworks.com or thebitworks@gmail.com . You may also contact us by postal mail at The BitWorks Inc., 368 Bench Street, PO Box 163, Taylors Falls, MN 55084 or call us at (651) 465-3225 or (855) 365-3225 toll free. Please note, it is at the sole discretion of The BitWorks to provide assistance in troubleshooting e-mail or whitelisting a domain. Charges for troubleshooting assistance will apply.

Need to Get Whitelisted?

Make sure you include your e-mail address, as well as the e-mail address you are trying to send to.  Note: We can not remove you from Internet based spamlists, only the lists we maintain.
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Specific Policies

Gray Listed = Our mailservers will “temporarily reject” any email from a sender / mailserver it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server should try again and the email will be accepted. If the mail is from a spammer it will probably not be retried since a spammer goes through thousands of email addresses and can not afford the time delay to retry. Many non RFC compliant mailer programs will be gray listed by our servers and mail will have difficulty getting through, please resend your e-mail using a standards based mail program.

Empty RDNS = Your mailserver’s IP address does not have a reverse domain name setup. Many spammers will try to send from non-existent or temporary domain names, so we block them. If you have a valid mailserver and are having problems notify your webmaster and let them know that its not worth doing something unless its done right and they need to put in a reverse dns entry for your mailserver.

Block Lists = We use a variety of block lists that are publicly available on the Internet. If your mailserver appears in the list it will be blocked. No, we will not take down the list because your server appears on it – contact us and we will whitelist your server if need be, but there is a charge for doing so. If you are having difficulty getting off a list contact us and we can recommend a number of reputable hosting companies who follow best practices for hosting websites and you will not have e-mail issues.

Specific Error Messages

DENIED_ACCESS_DENIED

Access is denied to our mail server.

DENIED_AUTH_REQUIRED

Authorization is required to send mail through this server.

DENIED_BLACKLIST_IP

Your IP Address is listed in our locally maintained blacklist. Please contact us for removal.  Removal Request

DENIED_BLACKLIST_NAME

Your domain name is blacklisted on our servers. Please contact us for removal or whitelisting.  Please insure that the IP address of your server resolves to a hostname other than a generic hostname provided by your ISP.  Generic ISP hostnames are generally banned. Whitelist Request

DENIED_EARLYTALKER

Your mail server is not following the SMTP protocol. Please check your mail servers operation.

DENIED_GRAYLISTED

Your address has been graylisted, you will be authorized to send a message to the recipient in 10 minutes, try back then.

DENIED_IDENTICAL_SENDER_RECIPIENT

The sender and receiver of the message are identical and coming from outside our servers, this is not allowed.

DENIED_IP_IN_CC_RDNS

Your reverse DNS entry contains an IP address and a country code. This is in general bad form, contact your ISP to get a proper reverse DNS entry.

DENIED_IP_IN_RDNS

Your reverse DNS entry contains an IP address and appears to be a default provider address, please check out the RFC (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2821) , basically you need a proper reverse domain name service entry suitable for sending e-mail. Contact your ISP to get a proper reverse DNS entry that (generally this is free).

DENIED_OTHER

Generally means our systems might be having an issue receiving mail right now. Please contact us for help.

DENIED_RBL_MATCH

Your e-mail, mail server or IP address is in a black list. You can not send mail to us without manually white listing your address. You might want to get off that blacklist so that you can send mail to other people too. Whitelist Request

DENIED_RDNS_MISSING

You need a reverse DNS entry for your mail server. Contact your ISP, they can help you.

DENIED_RDNS_RESOLVE

Your reverse DNS entry does not properly resolve. Contact your ISP, they can help you.

DENIED_RBL_MATCH

Your domain name is listed in an internet based blacklist, Contact the provider in the e-mail to be removed. Contact us for manual whitelisting or fill out this  Whitelist Request

DENIED_RECIPIENT_BLACKLISTED

The person you are sending to is not receiving mail at this time.

DENIED_REJECT_ALL

Mail is currently turned off our our systems. Usually this is a maintenance issue and it will be up and running shortly.

DENIED_RELAYING

Relaying of mail through our servers is not allowed unless expressly defined.

DENIED_SENDER_BLACKLISTED

Your e-mail address has been blacklisted, usually this has been manuallly configured, contact us for removal. Whitelist Request

DENIED_SENDER_NO_MX

The domain that you are trying to e-mail from does not have a Mail eXchanger address. You need to have one to send through our servers.

DENIED_TOO_MANY_RECIPIENTS

Your e-mail was sent to too many recipients on our servers. Try sending multiple e-mails to a portion of your mailing list.

DENIED_UNQUALIFIED_RECIPIENT

Improper recipient address, it looks like it might be missing stuff after the @ symbol.

DENIED_ZERO_RECIPIENTS

No recipient came through with your message. You need to specify a recipient to send mail through our servers.

FAILURE_AUTH

You failed to authenticate against the mail server. Check your password and make sure it is correct.

FAILURE_TLS

The mailservers failed to negotiate a secure connection. Generally this indicates one server needs maintenance applied.

TIMEOUT

The mailservers made a connection, but that connection timed out prior to the mail being delivered completely. Chances are this is an Internet or networking error.

UNKNOWN_AUTH

You tried to authenticate to our mailservers using a method they do not understand.