This is exactly the issue and the rabid anti-spammers ignore the fact that most smallers IAPs do NOT run a good mail service and many don't want to. They are denying legitimate service, to legitimate users, whilst attacking a legitimate business, because they don't want to understand anything outside of their little parochial world. Some call that ignorance. BTW, I nuke spammers on sight. The real answer is putting an authentication layer into SMTP.
Behalf Of Patrick Evans Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 1999 3:58 AM To: Roeland M.J. Meyer Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: ARIN whois
On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
absolutely ignore valid business uses for the relays. They don't understand that someone might want to use a different SMTP server, than the one their ISP uses, in order to send to someone in the WEB, FTN, VPN, or PER TLDs. That sort of gateway MUST allow relays in order to function.
The key problem we've run into is that while customers may have a domain hosted with us, they're dialling up to a third party ISP. Normally we'd tell them 'set your email program up to send mail as you@your.domain', but some ISPs (most notably the free ones) seem to only permit mail to go out through their relays if the mail comes from username@their.isp.
Of course, we simply tell them to sign up to an ISP that doesn't restrict them in every possible way, but there are a few who are rather anti-this (most notably those on AOL).
I'd love to be able to run open relays for these users, to let them send mail out with their own domain on the From: header. The net's not the same place it was even 5 years ago, though, and we just can't leave ourselves vulnerable like that.
Ain't progress marvellous?