[Discuss] Verizon blacklisted me

[Daniel Barrett]

Chapter 2 of the saga...

After Verizon insisted for the Nth time that I am not blacklisted and
my email client settings must be wrong, I tried an experiment. My
Verizon username and password definitely work on verizon.com and
webmail.verizon.com. Could it be possible, I wondered, that they could
be failing ONLY on smtp.verizon.net? The answer appears to be YES.

I used telnet and stunnel4 to talk to smtp.verizon.net over port 465,
using the "AUTH LOGIN" command to authenticate, after base-64-encoding
my username and password:

  $ telnet localhost <stunnel port number>
  ...
  220 vms173025pub.verizon.net -- Server ESMTP (Sun Java(tm) System Messaging
  Server 7u2-7.02 32bit (built Apr 16 2009))
  ehlo blazemonger.com
  250-vms173025pub.verizon.net
  250-8BITMIME
  250-PIPELINING
  250-CHUNKING
  250-DSN
  250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
  250-HELP
  250-XLOOP 909D1845605982A0426FBB076A98755C
  250-AUTH DIGEST-MD5 PLAIN LOGIN CRAM-MD5
  250-AUTH=LOGIN PLAIN
  250-ETRN
  250-NO-SOLICITING
  250 SIZE 20971520
  auth login
  334 VXNlcm5hbWU6
  <pasted my base-64 encrypted Verizon username>
  334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6
  <pasted my base-64 encrypted Verizon password>
  535 5.7.8 Bad username or password (Authentication failed).

And lo and behold, Verizon's SMTP server rejected my valid
username/password combination. (I don't know why I'm seeing a "535
5.7.8" error here vs. a "550 5.7.0" blacklist error when I send mail
through postfix.)

I'd never done the above AUTH LOGIN technique before, so I tried it
with a non-Verizon SMTP server, and authentication worked
perfectly. So the method should be OK, but smtp.verizon.net is
rejecting my credentials.

So, my current hypothesis is that my Verizon username and/or password
got mysteriously changed (or removed) from whatever repository that
smtp.verizon.net checks, while it's still valid on other Verizon web
sites. I am not optimistic about even getting a Verizon rep to
understand this problem...!

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com