Hello listserv colleagues! I think the listservs are more or less back in service. But for about 30% of our listserv members, the member’s email service provider (ESP) is blocking our postings as spam. If you are in that 30%, I urge you to direct your ESP to stop the blocking. This may include whitelisting the new IP address or speaking frankly with your ESP.
And if you posted anything to any of the listservs since about December 21, I am sorry to say you will probably need to repost it.
It took a lot of my professional time to deal with this. And the hosting service will cost a bit more in perpetuity. I will gladly receive donations to help support this, as detailed below.
Details follow.
The hosting company (Namecheap) that hosts our listservs made an unwise policy change on December 22, 2025 that broke every listserv that is hosted for any Namecheap customer on Namecheap’s “shared hosting” servers. This included the twenty or so listservs that my firm hosts. Starting that day, only the first 100 or so listserv emails would get sent. For our typical listserv communities, with a thousand or more members, this meant that Namecheap would silently discard 900 or so of the listserv emails.
Adding insult to injury, Namecheap failed to communicate the policy change to any of its listserv customers (and so did not communicate it to me). The fact that perhaps ten percent of the emails would go through meant that at first, there might not be much of a clear indication that things were actually badly broken. It took me until three days later (December 25, see blog posting) to realize that something was very wrong. The main tipoff was that on each of the twenty or so listservs, there were two or three members who kept asking me if they should be worried that they had received no postings in recent days.
Thank you by the way to those listserv members who went to the trouble to gently pester me about this. You know who you are, and I thank you. Without your gentle pestering, it is anyone’s guess how many more days it would have taken me to catch on that things were seriously wrong.
It took some hours of tech support chats (on December 25) to get Namecheap to fess up to the policy change, and to arrive at a path toward restoration of the listserv functions. The path that Namecheap offered was to migrate our software platform (called cPanel) from a “shared hosting” server to a VPS (virtual private server). Namecheap promised me that they would migrate our cPanel (which would preserve listserv memberships and message archives) from the old server to the new server in a seamless way. Yes the monthly fee for the service would be higher, but there would be no charge for the cPanel migration and it would be seamless. Other than paying more money, I would not have to lift a finger.
I had to do several things on the old server to get it ready for the migration, and it took me until yesterday, December 29 to get that done. Namecheap’s migration commenced and then supposedly finished. Namecheap made several mistakes, however, that I had to troubleshoot and fix.
First mistake. I had specified particular nameservers that the domain (“oppedahl-lists.com”) would use, but some Namecheap person arbitrarily picked different nameservers without telling me. It was a lot of work to pin down this mistake and it was some work to figure out how to undo Namecheap’s mistake on this.
Second mistake. Namecheap failed to correctly set a “PTR record” which is an important thing for email to be deliverable. When the PTR record is wrong, this will prompt many email service providers (ESPs) to be skeptical about an inbound email and to discard it as purported spam. Namecheap had set the PTR record to a value that made no sense and that virtually guaranteed that messages would get discarded. This is a basic thing that Namecheap should have gotten right, but I had to fix it myself. (I corrected the PTR record to say “oppedahl-lists.com”.)
Third mistake. Namecheap failed to set correctly the “HELO name” in the SMTP settings of the new server. (The HELO name is also an important thing for email to be deliverable.) As with PTR records, if the HELO name is wrong, this will prompt many ESPs to discard an email. (The “HELO name” that had been set on this server was a wacko crazy name that I suppose must have been tied to whatever customer had previously been served by this new-to-us server.) This mistake, too, was one that I had to identify, and having identified the mistake, I had to fix it myself.
Namecheap did get a few things right. There are several additional things that one must do, when setting up an email server like this one, to reassure ESPs that the inbound email from us is legitimate instead of spam. These include DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records. All of these things were already correctly configured when they were on the old “shared hosting” server and so they continued to be correctly configured when they got migrated to the new Virtual Private Server. But the SPF record needed to be updated to recognize the new IP address of the new server, and Namecheap did correctly update the SPF record.
The old “shared hosting” server for the listservs was at IP address 66.29.132.148. The new virtual private server is at IP address 159.198.40.90. Both IP addresses are “clean”, meaning that they are not on any black hole list. (Indeed both IP addresses even avoided landing on the super-picky UCEPROTECTL3 blackhole list, that tags you as a suspected spammer for no reason other than that your IP address is “nearby” in numerical sequence to an IP address of an actual spammer.)
But some ESPs are bouncing the postings. I have done some test postings on the new server and have tracked the delivery of the postings. I find that about 30% of the emails are bouncing. It means that various email service providers (ESPs) are wrongly discarding the emails as if they were spam.
It is wrong for an ESP to bounce any of our listserv postings as spam, for quite a few reasons. First, we are doing everything right. We have DKIM set up, as well as SPF and DMARC. What’s more, our PTR and HELO records are exactly right. Not only that, anybody who would actually view one of our emails with his or her own eyes would instantly appreciate that it is not spam.
Despite all of this, for about 30% of our listserv members, the member’s email service provider (ESP) is blocking our postings as spam. To the extent that there might be a bit of a legitimate reason to doubt the legitimacy of our emails, it might be that our new IP address 159.198.40.90 had not previously been emitting some dozens or hundreds of number of email messages per day to that ESP. But that’s not really a good excuse, first because of our DKIM and SPR and DMARC settings, but also because … wait for it … the emails are instantly recognizable as not being spam.
If you are in that 30%, I urge you to direct your ESP to stop the blocking. It will be important for you to whitelist the new IP address 159.198.40.90. (No, I am unable to tell you how to induce your particular ESP to whitelist an IP address. Each ESP has its own, usually obscure, way to do this.) Presumably you had already long ago whitelisted the domain name “opppedahl-lists.com”, but in the unlikely event you had failed to do that in the past, now is the time to do it. (Again I cannot tell you how do do this with your particular ESP. You will have to figure it out.) You may need to have some very direct and frank communication to your ESP to get results.
Needing to repost. If you posted anything to any of the listservs since about December 21, I am sorry to say you will probably need to repost it.
Donations. In the thirty years that my firm has hosted these listservs, I have never asked for donations. But the past eight days have consumed so many hours of professional time that I feel differently than in the past. And, going forward, the hosting service will cost more than in the past. So I will gratefully accept donations. To find out how to donate, click here.
“Presumably you had already long ago whitelisted the domain name “opppedahl [sic]-lists.com” “