From: Terry Carmen (terrycnysupport.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2008 - 07:49:28 CDT

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M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 21:46:27 PM -0400, Terry Carmen wrote:
>
>
>> Some businesses are strictly local and have no need to accept mail
>> from outside their geographic region... it's perfectly reasonable to
>> only accept mail from locations you do business with.
>> For example, one of my clients, has business locations and customers
>> in the eastern US... By only accepting connections from systems
>> inside the geographic area they service, literally millions of
>> spams/month can simply be ignored, with zero lost business.
>>
>
> as a freelance writer interested in F/OSS original stories, I
> *continuously* surf the net searching for small businesses, big
> businesses and NGOs worldwide. Whenever I end up writing an article,
> it's good, free advertising for that organization, regardless of how
> restricted their *current* business area is. Of course, if I cannot
> reach them, no article, no publicity, no way others can know, for
> example, that those people could use some suggestions on how to set up
> some server.
>
If your message is rejected, the 5xx reject contains a toll free number
to call to be whitelisted.

...

Many other examples deleted.
...

You're missing the point, that this is a business decision, not a
technical decision.

Until SMTP is replaced or enhanced so that each message is guaranteed to
come from a verifiable (and blockable) individual person, companies will
continue to use more and more draconian measures to keep their email usable.

Sure, it would be nice to accept email from everywhere, but email costs
money when it gets out of hand. By blocking mail from unwanted
geographic locations, they're able to handle all their email on three
servers running at a low utilization level with a couple of admins.
Since more than 95% of their inbound is spam, I'll let you do the math
as to what the hardware and payroll costs would be if it was necessary
to accept and process each message from anywhere.

Do you know what's worse for business than a friendly reject message
that contains a toll-free number? Accepting a customer message, then
mistakenly deleting it as spam.

Terry

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