terry.gilsenaninteroil.com
Date: Tue Jan 01 2008 - 22:42:48 CST

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

Kevin Stevens wrote:
>
> On Jan 1, 2008, at 18:08, terry.gilsenaninteroil.com wrote:
>
>> Matthias Schmidt wrote:
>>> Am/On Tue, 1 Jan 2008 20:45:37 -0500 schrieb/wrote Terry Carmen:
>>>
>>> with these rules you might also reject legal eMails from servers
>>> running
>>> via dyndns, or?
>>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> Surely that would depend entirely on the recipients interpretation of
>> "legal eMails", eg: my server, my rules.
>>
>> I am of the opinion that people on dynamic connections should ether
>> be relaying emails via their ISP's SmartHost, or connecting to the
>> submission port and authenticating (method not discussed here). Its
>> one or the other.
>>
>> Regards,
>> T
>
> Well - no.
>
> You can certainly decide to accept or reject whatever mail you want by
> whatever rules you define, but legality, in this context, means RFC
> compliant. As someone who runs a compliant mailserver, on a business
> DSL IP (static), I get a lot of blocks from over-enthusiastic blacklists.
>
> KeS
>
It is "Legal" according to the RCF's for an MX server to reject any
email for any reason at all, so long as the appropriate reply is made by
the server to the client. For example the Server could be configured to
reject all email from IP addresses that have a odd number in it, or
reject on all email addresses from a .com domain, or even all emails
that have any X- headers inserted, or perhaps all email from email
addresses with female gender inflected names in either domain or email
address. It is legal so long as the server replies to the attempted
transmission from the client with an appropriate response.

Using a blacklist is entirely legal as per RFC's, so long as the email
is rejected _DURING_ the SMTP transaction, any time before issuing a 200
OK for the email data.

Even rejecting entire netblocks based on Country is legal according to
RFC's provided the appropriate response is given to the client by the
server _during_ the SMTP transaction.

The only overarching requirement is that abuse and postmaster are able
to rec'v email from everywhere.

Your server on the other hand, may be RCF compliant, however that is
irrelevant if the MTA to which you are trying to deliver email is
rejecting dynamic IP's. people can be as enthusiastic as the wish with
their blocklist usage, after all, it is their bandwidth that they are
saving. Many people in this world have to pay for each and every
megabyte that they use, and is they want to restrict emails to a 0/8
blocklist and a small whitelist, with a 50kb message size limit, then
that is entirely their call.

If you get your email blocked by servers configured to block email from
DSL links, then that is the recipients choice, you can ask them to
whitelist, or you can contact your ISP and use their SmartHost perhaps
(if they have one for their clients use that is).

Regards,
T

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]