Re: [Exim] DNSBL maybe? (OT)

Hi Odhiambo, on Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:19:01 +0300 you wrote:

> My problem is that I haven't been able to deliver mail to msn.com

msn.com seem to have firewalled almost the entire world out, in a weird
accept-TCP-connection-then-drop-instantly kind of way (heh, maybe they
should have used a 554 on connect instead? ;). I think it's some bizarre
kind of SMTP-level opt-in, where you're firewalled out unless/until you
ask...

If delivering to MSN is important, try e-mailing msnalert@???
and explain. They sorted the two problematic netblocks I had within about
30 minutes, though with no explanation as to why/on what criteria (if any)
they'd been blocked in the first place.

Though the reference to "opt-in" above was intended (moderately)
humourously, I do rather suspect that in a draconian action which may
perhaps be a taste of things to come, MSN have tried to cut spam by
blanket-banning large swathes of IP space and wait for legitimate admins
to complain, and then unblock those. If so, I'm guessing the reasoning is
that they have a huge enough userbase that when people start complaining
that MSN e-mails bounce then rather than complaining that MSN is broken,
they will complain to their local sysadmin, who will have to ask nicely to
be unblocked.

If I'm right, then whilst I'll be the first to support their prerogative
to block who they like on their servers, it makes me slightly uneasy. I
don't suggest for one minute that this is the case in this situation (in
fact, as above, my experience is the exact opposite), but when you've got
a userbase the size of MSN, the potential for abuse of the coercive power
(on smaller entities) of private blacklisting is worrying (consider the
situation of a legitimate smaller competitor, whose users really needed to
e-mail to MSN users...). However, this is getting rather OT.

Just to digress one further bit briefly while we're on the topic of
well-known e-mail providers though, is it just me or is
netscapeonline.co.uk completely dead (at least from an SMTP POV)? At one
time quite a few people had addresses there but I'm damned if any servers
I know can ever manage to get anything to them these days. Have they
killed off their free email service?


Tim