Suddenly Emails Bouncing 5231

Robert M. Riches Jr. wrote (in part):

I am one of these "snobs" who refuses e-mail from a couple of these lists using blackhole lists. It does not eliminate spam, but it does reduce it. My Mail Transfer Agent (MTA, sendmail) is set up to log each dropped e-mail and I get a summary of dropped e-mails each day (with logwatch). In the years I have been using it, it has never dropped a non-spam e-mail for me. I also use the access filtering of sendmail to drop whole countries (e.g., Brazil, China, Korea), and some overspamming ISPs (e.g., hotmail). This reduces my spam load to a few dozen a day.

I do not consider that a proper characterization in that there is no whitelist in the way I do things. There are blacklists. So I accept all e-mail except for that coming from blacklisted senders. True, IP addresses that do not resolve in DNS are among them, and these are typically dial-up blocks of IP addresses voluntarily supplied by various ISPs. Also in the lists are know open relays, etc., widely used by spammers.

Since my machine resolves in DNS, I do not bother to send e-mail through my ISP's mail server (these UseNet posts do go through their news server, though), and my e-mails do not seem to get bounced.

Seems like a lot of work. Why not just get a static IP address that resolves in DNS?

My mutt is not set up to do that. It just sends everything through localhost's MTA, and the MTA worries about such things for all Mail User Agents (such as mutt,bin-mail, etc.).

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 07:40:00 up 11 days, 6:02, 4 users, load average: 4.24, 4.25, 4.19