Ove Kaaven wrote:
On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Francois Gouget wrote:
Sure they have the right to deny me access to their mail server, but to imply that I'm only allowed to connect to my ISP's mail server is bullshit.
Exactly why? You *should* use your ISP's mail server, that's what it's there for. Anything else is inefficient and plain stupid. You've found one of the reasons it's stupid - another is that if the target mailserver is unreachable for the moment, it's better to let the ISP's mailserver try again for the usual 5 days than to sit dialed up yourself for 5 days. Yet another reason would be that since your ISP generally has more bandwidth than your own dialup connection, both SMTP connections are less likely to time out and cause unnecessary retries, delays, and traffic.
That is most definitely correct.
Well, I cannot tell you that you should switch to another ISP, it would be too easy for me and hypocritical as I'm not sure I would do it if I were in your situation. I'll see if I can send them a complaint email (without it getting bounced).
Maybe *you* should switch to another ISP, one that is able to educate their users properly.
That's kind of harsh, but yeah, you should definitely be going through your ISPs mail server if you have a dialup. Personally I run my own, but I have a cable modem and @Home uses bad mailservers which crash all the time. If I had a dial-up I would most definitely go through my ISPs mail-server.
I also filter mail with all of the MAPS list and my own threats to spammers. It has been very effective, reducing my spam to a few per week which I usually forward to the admins of the mail servers or connections involved. Lately I have been kind of lax about that figuring a few per week is not bad. Apparently the spammers have a black-list of their own. Report enough of them to ISPs and you won't get more spam because they don't want to deal with your shit anymore. ;-). Still doesn't help those who don't have the knowledge to effectively report spam, but it has reduced my spam very nicely.
-Dave