> Haines,
>
> (Was I perhaps the addressee? I don't know of any other primenet
> addresses on this list).
Bob, I've been struggling to transfer a dozen lists from one mail
server to another, and the confusion is making my head
spin. Anything's possible, but I'm pretty sure my message went out to
the linux-hams or linux-newbie list as a whole.
Complicating it even more, when my old ISP sold out to PSI, they moved
everything to Ascend servers in Virginia. That screwed up everything
and anti-spam measures there have slowed things down. So I decided to
switch ISPs to another regional ISP up here in New England, which had
a good reputation, but that was a disaster. Nothing worked, and in
pursuing the matter, it seems they were using the same Ascend servers
in Virginia as my old ISP! Both companies are just sales offices and
don't know and don't care about what servers they happen to contract
with for the day. They hire tech support folks whose only
qualification is they know Microsoft (and Mac), and so while I used to
at least reach people who had some interest or even some experience
(OS/2), that is no longer the case.
This trend worries me more than the "Big Brother" aspect of anti-spam
measures, although that is a pain, too. I run a site that has a few
thousand historical docs meant for HS and college history students. I
suspect that because an occasional document can be explicit, the site
is flagged as porno. Probably just as well because I have trouble
affording the 5 Gb monthly transfer as it is ;-(. I worry that we are
feeding our kids intellectual pablum or propaganda rather than really
trying to educate.
I finally contacted a small local ISP which was a freshing change. It
was started years ago by some enthustic kids, and I've often
recommended it to others, but never looked into it for myself. I find
that it has maintained its spirit of technological adventure. They
emphasize they don't run Ascend, but Sun servers, and not NT, but
Apache! They KNOW that they support Java servlets on these
servers. They DO enthusastically support Linux and run it
themselves. The secretary answering the phone was not only pleasant,
but well informed. And it seems they are in it for the duration rather
than grab big bucks by selling out to the giants. I'll be changing to
them as soon as I can.
> I ran into this a year or so ago and had some heated discussions with
> the mail guru at Primenet. He said that it was an anti-spam measure.
> This type of message means that the system won't accept mail sent from
> a user's smtp server on a dial-up connection with a dynamic ip (the
> reverse lookup indicates you are using one PSI's dialups.) These
> apparently are often used by spammers whose MTA is configured to send
> directly to the recipient as a way to get around filtering by their own
> ISP's smtp server. Primenet (and several others) have filters which
> will bounce such mail. Of course, I still get more than my share of
> spam, but I got nowhere in the discussion.
>
> The way around it is to forward all smtp to your ISP's smtp server (or
> some other (static ip) host which is configured to allow you to relay,
> but does not permit open relaying.
As a matter of fact, my failed effort to get my old ISP to do this
last Fall was the main reason I looked into changing ISPs. One can
never reach the server administration because it is a different
company, and they won't reveal who it is.
Haines
