Does anyone know what this means?

 

I am using Thunderbird on Ubuntu LTS.

 

I got this message:

<start>
Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail. The
server responded: impout008.msg.chrl.nc.charter.net cmsmtp <this was my IP
address, the DHCP address assigned to me by Spectrum?) blocked. Please see
<https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/understanding-email-error-codes>
https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/understanding-email-error-codes
for more information. AUP#Out-1020.
<end>

The referenced site describes AUP#Out-1020 as

<start>
This email account has limited access to send emails based on suspicious
activity. Blocks will expire based on the nature of the activity. If you're
a Spectrum customer,  <https://www.spectrum.net/contact-us> contact us to
remove the block.
<end>

What is that "suspicious activity"? Is there anything I can do to find out
what it is? Do I need to be worried about this?

The "contact us" is just the Spectrum chat, which is unhelpful. If I talk to
an agent, she says that they cannot help me and that I must contact
Spamhaus. Spamhaus tells me on their site that if I do not have my own mail
server (I do not), my ISP (Spectrum) must provide a request to unblock.
Spectrum says they cannot help and I must follow Spamhaus directions (which
are to contact my ISP). It appears that I am stuck in circular logic here.

What's curious here though is that the IP address listed in the error
message is my personal DHCP address provided by Spectrum, not the IP address
of the Spectrum server. That seems strange because I do not run a mail
server. My email should appear to come from the IP address of the Spectrum
mail server.

I once had a Spectrum engineer tell me that "all residential IPs are dynamic
which are automatically listed on some blacklists. It is completely normal
and would only cause issues if you are trying to host your own mail server,
not just sending email through IMAP and it would definitely not stop
anything from being sent through webmail. This would impact all of our
residential customers if it were the case."

Spectrum tells me they cannot change my IP address. But it is DHCP? Why
can't they just terminate my DHCP lease and renew it with a different
address? If I locally kill my DHCP lease, and renew it, I just get the very
same IP address again, not a new one.

 

-Mark

 

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