AOL now rejecting mail from Comcast residential IPs.

Blake, Chris cblake at cswcasa.com
Mon Mar 31 11:52:33 EST 2003


>> Oh my GOD man.  They rejected your SMTP email.  Shesh.  Since the
>> protocol has no built in method of authentication, this is the best
>> they can do.  You can either eat spam, or do something like this.
>
>Or you can go after the spammers.  Which is the only right way to go
>about the problem.  Make spamming not worth the potential gains.  Fine
>the bastards for every spam sent.

A good amount of the spam I get is from Southeast Asia - good luck going
after them

>> They are blacklisting addresses of known open relays.
>
>Wrong wrong wrong.  They are blacklisting entire IP blocks, where some
>(relatively) few bad eggs live.

Unless I misunderstand, you don't have a static IP address, but rather a
dynamic address (that may change infrequently) within one of those IP
blocks.

So I think the pizza delivery analogy fits this perfectly.  

Since the address can change, they can't very well blacklist a single
address within the block. The only viable option is to blacklist the whole
block.

If you had a static address, I would argue in your favor since they could
tell if you were spamming and punish you accordingly.

I spend a good part of my day, every day, just deleting the spam that works
its way though my email filters.  Anything that lessens that is a good
thing.  I am considering turning on the reverse-lookup to ensure that my
SMTP servers don't accept email from spoofed addresses, even though that
would use up precious network resources.

Chris Blake



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