[SGVLUG] E-mail "stamps" -- someone finally did it, it seems...

[Dustin]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Greg Stark wrote:

> Correction, I believe dslextreme.com will let you send outbound port 25.
> You have to agree to their term to be good and not be an open relay.  I
> found this out a month ago.

Sure, this machine is a mail host on DSLExtreme.  I think I discussed this
with Mike some time ago, and the issue is that the machine in question
generates a volume of mail traffic that DSLExtreme assumes is proof of
spamming or something regardless of the content of the traffic.

While I like their service in general I must say this isn't the only sign
of ignorance--when I asked them if they have an ntp server I could sync
with at first they thought I meant NNTP and then claimed they had no such
machine.  That is of course almost certainly a complete lie--what is
probably true is that they don't provide the service to their customers,
but it doesn't earn any points with me to tell a probable technical lie to
cover it.  (This was before I found multiple level 1 servers to sync to
and added myself to the public ntp pool, so maybe in the end it was a good
thing to motivate me to get, and then give back, better service than they
probably do.)

Do I recall correctly, Mike?  I think at the time I suggested looking into 
SpeakEasy--they seem to maintain a uber-geek friendly image, so perhaps 
they will actually know why someone might generate a lot of mail without 
being a spammer.

Of course, as his tunnel solution shows, it mostly stops the unskilled,
but then DSLExtreme probably doesn't care about results per se, only
looking like they have a strong policy.

Dustin