On Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:48:15 -0600, Tom Brown wrote:

Well, I solved it myself by purchasing a SMTP account from www.Fastmail.fm.
It cost $15 for a one-time fee to get use of their SMTP server and it solved
my problems with AT&T. It is also noticably faster! All I had to do was
change the SMTP server in the OE account and change the Port to 26 and it
works great.

Until AOL blocks the Fastmail servers.

But, about AOL and CS arbitrarily rejecting an entire domain, do you thnk
they have decided to reject ALL Worldnet.att.net addresses? I really don't
care any more since I got the new SMTP server but it's amazing that they
would do that.

Actually, AOL would more likely block the IP address of the AT&T
Worldnet servers. They have blocked Comcast, Yahoo!, and AT&T SMTP
servers from time to time. Based on AOL complaints that "this is spam"
from those servers. Some of it may be due backscatter from auto
responders (including AV email scanners which send (un)helpful messages
to the Return-Path (mostly forged) email address in the viral message),
bounces (also to the putative sender), and the like.

Comcast has done it to Hotmail, and Verizon has done it to most of
Europe. It is part of the cost of allowing spam to flow across the
Internet.

--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum