Vat of Knowledge

So I ran into an issue with Verizon Wireless the other day.  Since our Exchange server resides in Hong Kong now (after migration from the U.S.), Verizon Wireless apparently blocks entire countries from sending to their mail servers @verizonwireless.com.  I needed to get email to our account rep, as well as send forms to add authorized telecom users to the account, but my emails were timing out.  Upon further investigation, at a command prompt using telnet from my mail server in HK, I could see that we were being straight out rejected, though the error given from pluto.verizonwireless.com was less than helpful in that regard.  All I got was an error 554 when I tried to telnet to it, and it would disconnect me.  Had to assume that our IP block was just blacklisted, which it was.

But who to contact to get this straightened out?  I found www.verizon.net/whitelist, but this only whitelists you with verizon.net, not VZW, as these are two totally different IT departments.  What I typically do to get whitelisted with a company is to go to www.internic.net/whois.html and do a lookup of the domain and find out who the technical contact is.  In this case, the company is so large, I figured it wouldn’t work, and figured that I would be spending some time on the phone, getting transferred from one rep to the next until I got someone at Verizon who had a clue as to what my request was about.  I want to mention right here, as well, that we DO have reverse DNS records set up for our mail server, so this should simply have not happened in the first place.  At any rate, just so you know, the technical contact forwarded this to an admin who took care of it.  When I asked who to contact in the future, the admin told me to contact him directly, which means they have no mechanism for filing a complaint to get your domain whitelisted.  Just a word of advice, contact the tech contact for the domain to get results.