Baslinux mailing list

[Justin Gombos <mindfuq AT sbcglobal.net>]

* 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org <3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org> [2006-11-18 22:33]:
> 
> That's fine as long as your self-serving setup is working well.
> Clearly, it is not.

My server is running fine.  Local delivery is flawless, confirmed by
my logs.  Ibiblio's server is rejecting it because it's
(intentionally) malconfigured.  Essentailly what it boils down to is
some servers use intelligent scoring techniques to seperate the spam
(as mine does for inbound mail), while others take a more aggressive
stance and select email on the basis of characteristics that
frequently appear in spam, but not /necessarily/.  

At the cost of false positives, ibiblio and a minority few other
servers will reject messages that come from an unregistered domain.
This unusual practice is unethical, and discouraged by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.  The real toll society pays on spam is not the
resource burdon as much as it is the denial of legitimate mail (which
sometimes occurs as a result of pure congestion, but more frequently
from false positives).

Fortunately, it's rare enough that I can handle it by adding
malconfigured servers to my transport file (the special treatment I
was talking about).  It is getting more and more common to reject
connections on the basis of dynamic IP addresses, however, the victims
represent a small group - the few self sufficient hobbyists who want
the freedom to control the nuts and bolts of their networks, and
script everything.  Consequently, the problem goes largely unnoticed,
so it's not unlikely that you might be hearing it for the first time.
Windows users never run their own mail servers, which represents over
95% of the clients out there.  (Incidentally, Microsoft is one of the
proponents behind these more draconian anti-spam policies because the
false positives from these techniques do not affect Windows users).