Re: primenet.com rejects mail from ibm.net

[George Bonser <grep@shorelink.com>]

Branden,

In life, it only takes one or two people to screw things up for everyone.
In this case, spammers buy "throw away" internet accounts from ISP's and
then deliver tons of email directly without going through the ISP's mail
server. This results in a lot of complaints but the ISP can not verify the
complaints because nothing is logged.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem and to some extent, both
are in use today. The first was is for mailhosts on the internet to deny
traffic directly from dialup IP addresses of major ISP's. This does not
impact the user even in the least. You can still send all the email you
want, you simply must relay the mail through your ISP's mail server. 

The second way is that ISP's are not allowing their dialup IP addresses
from making direct conntections on port 25 to IP addresses outside of
their network. It is a simple router configuration and all IP addresses
are blocked from outbound port 25 connections.

The way around this problem is to register a domain and get a static IP
address. If you are going to use a dynamic IP address from an ISP, you are
better served by using the ISP's mail server just like all the other
dialup users.