Susan,
It just ticks me off because I know there are a lot of
others who will be in this boat.
Indeed, there are. I have numerous small customers that have either a
single static IP or a /29 block from {Pacific Bell | your ISP} and that
occasionally are blocked because either the block is marked as
residential or the reverse lookup contains the string "dsl".
However, trying to be pragmatic, this is a situation that will
eventually solve by itself: Since having {Pacific Bell | your ISP} do
anything about it is not an option, when these customers are trying to
email to {AOL | some ISP} and are blocked, they will try first to have
if {AOL | some ISP} to whitelist the address; if it can't be done they
will say "get an ISP that does not suck".
There are two sides on this coin; one is that indeed this stinks, but
the other one is that AOL receives several billion spams a day, so I can
understand that they're trying to control the problem with the tools
they have.
Curious, have you tried to call AOL to get the IP of the customer
whitelisted?
Michel.
Of course, it's also possible people will just work around it, like so
many other things. Postfix transport maps allow relaying of specific
domains through (for example) pacbell's mail server, as does Qmail's
smtproute file, no? "I'm supporting a handful of smaller sites, and don't
have the time to chase down some support drone to request whitelistings."
It's just too easy to add "aol.com SMTP:mail.sbcglobal.net" or whatever.
If an incompetently run ISP relay server makes AOL happy, then their
customers can enjoy having mail delayed for the extra hours and maybe
dropped altogether.
Eventually things will implode. Until then, I predict poorly thought
out hacks will be answered with other poorly thought out hacks. =)
Gary E. Miller wrote:
Maybe if PacBell (and others) actually disciplined their more out of
control DSL customers then other ISPs would not feel the need to do it
for them.
It doesn't matter. A large percentage of open proxies are on dynamic DSL. Since a lot of ISPs will not handle proxy reports and take care of the problem, and the blacklists are about useless since the open proxy will switch IPs, it's just best to wipe out the entire dynamic range.
-Jack