On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 11:23:34PM +0300, Juha-Matti Tapio wrote: > On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 08:50:07PM +0100, Pigeon wrote: > > I am having the same problem. My mail server is neither an open relay > > nor a source of spam, but the IP block containing it was blacklisted > > by SORBS on May 18 purely on the grounds that the owner of SORBS > > doesn't like the look of the generic rDNS for that block, which is of > > the form "userXXX.adsl.metronet.co.uk". (My own rDNS has "pigeon" for > > "userXXX".) <http://pigeon.dyndns.org/stuff/crapstuff/sorbs.html> > > You have several mistakes here: > > 1) Sorbs does not list your IP as an open relay nor as a source of spam. My IP is treated by certain mail servers as a source of spam because it is listed on SORBS. Comes to the same thing. > 2) Sorbs deduces correctly that your IP address is a dial-up address. It's not a dialup, it's an ADSL address, which remains statically allocated to me for as long as I continue to be a customer of the ISP unless I manually apply to be allocated a different IP block. The dialup that I mentioned is purely a means of internet access that I can use when I'm away from home and has nothing to do with this discussion... surely you don't seriously think I'd leave a dialup connected all the time so I can run a mailserver on it? :-) > 3) Sorbs does not block your mail. Servers trusting Sorbs do. It comes to the same thing. If I'm going to allocate blame I'm going to allocate it to the root cause of the problem. Shoot SORBS in the head and all those servers would accept my mail again. > > Since UK Online > > uses SORBS (presumably because the list originally run by their parent > > organisation Easynet provided the starting point for SORBS), and my > > father is a UK Online customer, the result was that my father thought I > > was ignoring his emails for a month (until I found out what was going > > wrong) and thought I was ill or worse. > > If a local email system accepts email for delivery and it is not accepted by > the end server, any proper correctly functioning email system would return a > bounce that explains why the message was not delivered. Either your ISP's > system is broken and does not send bounces, or you father's ISP's system is > broken and it null-routes emails, or you simply did not notice the bounces. My ISP's system doesn't come into it. What was happening was that my father's ISP was routing all my emails into a "spam folder" on their server, so as far as their system was concerned the emails were "delivered" and therefore there were no bounces. The reason my father didn't know this was happening is that he retrieves emails over dialup using POP3, because this method minimises time online and therefore minimises the charges for the dialup. The "spam folder" is only accessible through the ISP's webmail service which my father never uses as it is slow, expensive and awkward compared to POP3. He didn't even know this effectively-hidden spam folder existed until my researches revealed what was going on. > > The DUHL page on the SORBS website says that the owner of SORBS thinks > > that everyone should be made to route their mail through a smarthost. > > I object violently to some arrogant little turd trying to force me to > > onfigure my mail server in accordance with his personal prejudices. > > You are free to object but I and many many other people object to receiving > email from people like you who do not wan't to play by the same rules as > everyone else. I play by the rules of SMTP. There are no "rules" that dictate how my SMTP connection should be routed. SORBS is trying to unilaterally rewrite the rules that everyone plays by. Why should you object to receiving mail on the grounds of its routing? That makes no sense. Object based on *content*, that's fine. Block based on routing, fair enough since you're a private individual rather than an ISP handling other people's mails, though it is a somewhat dysfunctional method. But object based on routing? You mean that if, say, your business had been trying to obtain a contract with some other business and the other business sent you an email saying that you had been awarded the contract, but didn't route it through their ISP's smarthost, you would *object* ? That's just weird. > Since this is debian-isp, I would like to know if someone has any actual > reasons why smarthosting should be considered a bad idea? Reliability, for a start - since UK Online has been mentioned, I might as well point out that their mailserver is somewhat unreliable and my father frequently can't send (or receive) mail for some hours because their server's got its electronic knickers in a twist. Not using a smarthost also keeps error handling under my control. And if the receiving server is down, the outgoing mail is queued on my server, so I know what's going on. Using a smarthost it could well sit in the queue on the smarthost for days while I wonder what's happened to it and why I haven't received a reply. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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