Re: primenet.com rejects mail from ibm.net
First of all, why are you sending this to the Debian list? *shrug* It
seems a bit off-topic.
> I protest in most strenous possible terms to this treatment.
You apparently don't understand the entire context of the error message.
Please, read on.
> I absolutely DO NOT send unsolicited commercial email.
...
> What ISP would you have me use? Yours? I thought this was a free
Primenet is not doing anything that many other ISPs and corporate LANs
don't do. In fact, what you've experienced isn't even directed at
IBM.net's customers, per se. If you were an IBM.net customer that was
following your ISP's directions for sending and recieving mail, you would
most likely have not recieved this message. Please, read on.
> What if several large ISP's, such as ibm.net, CompuServe, or AOL were to
> implement the same policy with respect to Primenet? You would lose
Many of them do, actually... Primenet's dialups are on the MAPS DUL, and
many large ISPs and corporate LANs participate in it, or some variation.
> This policy is unreasonable in the extreme. If your mail relay software is
Au contrare. The policy is highly reasonable. If _YOUR_ mail relay was
configured in the fashion your ISP most likely recommends, you would have
not seen this error.
What they have done is implemented a form of the MAPS DUL, the Dial-up
List. The MAPS DUL goes off the pretense that most (if not darn near all)
SMTP relays hanging off dynamically assigned dialup ports are nothing
more than spam generators, and that any legitimate user of said network's
mail services should be using the main mail server provided for customer
use (i.e. mail.(network).(tld) on most ISPs). A majority of "one-shot"
spams (which use the tactics you mentioned in your flame to Primenet
including use of fraudulent domain names, etc.) are sent in this fashion.
If you set your local sendmail to deliver to your "normal" mail relay
host, rather than try to handle the routing itself (that is, dumb down
your local sendmail and have it point to a "smarthost" for relaying) you
probably won't have this problem. I won't get in to the technical /
engineering argument of whether or not this tactic _should_ be done, but I
can attest to my own network's statistics on the matter: since we started
denying mail acceptance directly from IP blocks on the MAPS DUL,
spam on our local network has decreased from 100 messages a day, to around
10.
Another issue is that IBM.net historically (in my experience) is slow
to respond to spam complaints, and many times even claims that they have
no control over what their users send and do nothing. This may have lead
to Primenet's decision to cut off IBM.net dialups specifically, if they
only chose to do this to IBM.
Please note that they are not saying you can't send mail to Primenet.
They are, in essence, requesting that you go through your host network's
mail relay, rather than from your own dialup service. This is not an
unreasonable request, and expect to find more of this as time goes on.
> > <<< 571 We do not accept e-mail directly from IBM's dialup ports because of bulk e-mail. Please resend your e-mail via a valid mail exchanger.
> > 554 plndonut@primenet.com... Service unavailable
-Chris S.
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