On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:38:48 -0600, Tom Brown wrote:

"N. Miller" wrote in message
...

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,

This is unbelievable to me!

So, someone with a Comcast, Yahoo or AT&T email sends out some spam so AOL
decides to block millions of users from the same servers! UFB!

Or somebody just sets up a vacation, or "out of office" autoresponder,
without due care to limit the responses to only contacts in his Address
Book. Sending autoresponses to spam is called, "Backscatter", and it is
abuse in its own right.

I have never liked AOL and this makes me REALLY dislike them. Maybe I will
institute my own filter and just take everyone off my list who is with AOL.
That would make about as much sense as AOL's policies.

Could be useful. I have this filter in my Mercury/32 rules:

|If expression headers matches "Received: from*[([]20[01].[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+*" Goto "LACNIC"

It is really quite effective: It automatically deletes email with any IP
address from 200.0.0.1 to 210.255.255.254 in the headers. I don't know
anybody in Latin America, and nobody there has an reason to contact me.
A lot of spam comes from Latin American residential zombies. So I just
trash any email which claims to be from that region. I have similar
rules in force for India, China, and Korea.

Each mail server operator has to decide for himself what to allow, and
what to deny. For a long time, Comcast was denying any contact from MSN
Hotmail, and Verizon was denying contact from any European server, so
you should hate Comcast and Verizon no less than you hate AOL.

If you _must_ hate, then you should hate the spammers which have created
this email mess.

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