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Journal jawtheshark's Journal: All nodes are created equal... 15

Journal by jawtheshark
...or that was what it was, once in the good old days when I couldn't afford to be online 24/7. I've been running mailservers from my OpenBSD machines for, what, uhm, at least three years and there never was a problem.

Recently I started to get bounces, from stuff like gmx.net or writeme.com. I am blacklisted. Why? Not because my server is a relay, of course not! My server is not a relay and is secured as much as I know how to secure a machine. I can cope with not being able to send to gmx.net or writeme.com. No the only reason is that my server is on a DSL line. That's all: DSL == spammer these days. ( Sorbs database marks me as dynamic IP, hence "use ISP mailsever"... fun fun, joy, joy...)

However today my company seems to have implemented exactly the same kind of filter. (this morning, it was stull working) Ayup! I can't send email to my company anymore! Fun, eh? No, I do not have any other email addresses than those hosted by jawtheshark.com or willekens.lu. Why would I? It worked fine for years.

My point is: my node is not equal anymore. Does it mean that I need to have a fix IP address, a company and show my license as "certified mail administrator" to be able to run a mailserver? Well, that's insane: I enjoyed setting up this stuff, I learned a lot. How are future generations going to learn? Go and follow a sendmail course? This cripples the whole idea of an open internet. I guess the spammers have ruined it for us all.
I know there are people that say that my server should not send its own mail but should relay it to my ISP's mailsever. All good and well, but it spoils the whole point of having your own server: lightning fast deliveries, no size-checks on attachements, and especially no point of failure at the ISP. Not that I don't trust my ISP, it's pretty good, but I just like to have my fate in my own hands. Essentially: I now need to reconfigure my sendmail in order that it acts as a glorified mail fowarder. What a waste....

Anyone remembers how to config this? I saw it in discussions on slashdot when in the US some major ISP started to block from popular DSL/Cable services, but I never really wrote it down.

Update
For my future reference: How to route your outgoing mail through your Internet provider's mail servers

Update II Above solution doesn't work. It either strips my domain and replaces it with the one of my ISP (normal, it says "masquerading") or -if I remove options- it just doesn't arrive because my ISP server needs SMTP Authentication. Aaaargh! I don't even know the username and password I have at my ISP for email!

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All nodes are created equal... More

All nodes are created equal...

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  • This was years ago, because I used to use a few different dial up providers.

    Couldn't stand windows 98 crashing on me after a few days of uptime so I stopped in the end, oh those were the days.

    Fastmail.fm offer smtp server for 14.95 one off fee. http://www.fastmail.fm/ they might be worth a go.
    • Except that it would be another 15Euro on top of my already quite expensive 50Euro DSL Line (and it's only a 256/64kbps one!)
      Oh, one off fee? Do you mean "pay once and forget"? Should be looked into, but I still liked the fact that I could send as much as I wanted, and get my email delivered locally here in the apartment on my machine.
  • Can you not just get yourself a static IP address? Most DSL providers here in the UK will give you one if you ask for it, which may help. I agree with the principle, though. You shouldn't have to use the ISP's mail relay. I don't here, and I wouldn't want to have to. Like you, I have a reliable ISP. But I'd rather do things myself.

    Oh, and you want to ignore the "MASQUERADE_AS(yourisp.net)dnl" line in the instructions you linked to. You don't really want allmasquerade, either, otherwise bounce messages won

    • I should call my ISP in order to clarify that. I doubt they will give me a static IP. However that's not the problem, the IP's I get are semi-static. They change not very often. The problem is that they are on a DSL netblock and SPAM-blacklists block DSL (or cable, or dialup) netblocks. So even if my ISP says "sure dude, we understand the needs of our local geeks" and I get a static IP address within their DSL netblock, I'm still toast.
      Try out the link to sorbs and put in the my current IP (80.90.34.
  • I thought that's normally just the same as the username/password you use to connect to the ISP in the first place.

    The mail server could be guessed, if they are not nice enough to list it on their website - mail.ispname.com, pop.ispname.com, pop.mail.ispname.com, smtp.ispname.com ...

    • Nope, it's not the usename/password I use to connect to my ISP. The reason for this is quite technical and (surprise!) political. Remember: I live in a very small country. The competition of "physical connections" limits itself to the P&T [www.pt.lu] and uhm... noone else! So they have found nothing better than to separate the "physical line" with the "internet services". I can have a ISP different than the P&T, which I have and it is Visual Online [www.vo.lu] which is cheaper and has better service. However, the p
      • This also explains why I have two DSL bills: a physical one (30Euro) and a ISP one (20Euro)

        Ah, yes. They just introduced DSL here in Jakarta, with even more outrageous pricing. Rp 350 000 (~ 30) gets you a 384kbps downstream.. with a 500MB/mo bandwith cap! Unlimited 512kbps costs 10 times that.

        Figures are with the national comms carrier's ISP, probably a bit cheaper with an outside service but not too much. Sad.

  • I had a similar problem at work (where we use a cheap DSL line for our net stuff -- it's a very small company). Ran postfix for years, worked fine, and then a few months ago, I started getting bounces. I googled around and somehow tweaked postfix to just forward everything to the ISP's server. Fortunately, they don't change the headers the way your apparently does.

    As for your username+password, uh.. I know it goes against hacker instincts to do this, but you could talk to your ISP support people. ;-)

    • My ISP used to accept anything as input as long as it came from their IP range. Alas, they don't do that anymore. I'll still try to route my email through their server, even though I don't like the idea. I called the admin of my company and explained him that eventual clients might do like me and use a email server on a DSL line. It is not uncommon for small businesses to do that as far as I know.

      I know you can get virtual servers. It's not the same thing. If my brother now feels the need to send me

  • ..if I were an ISP proviing email services..
    • Of course, but I want to provide my *own* email services and not rely on them. Now I need to use them and in order to email I need to do SMTP AUTH from my sendmail to their exchange.
      That's really what all this rant is about. I can understand them requiring SMTP AUTH for normal users, but I'm not really a "normal users" as I consider their service only as a "pipe" to the internet. I don't use anything from them except that.
  • Above solution doesn't work. It either strips my domain and replaces it with the one of my ISP (normal, it says "masquerading")

    Like I said [slashdot.org], you don't want to masquerade as your ISP (although I could have been more explicit before). If you instead try masquerading as jawtheshark.com, then it should work, assuming your Unix login is the same as the user part of your email address -- if not, you need some extra trickery.

    • Hehehe, I made that update probably while you answered. I don't know. I found out that it was not the way, and I have found some extra information on the trickery to do. Back at a slashdot thread about AOL blocking DSL lines. Personally I think it is a bad move from the ISP's/compan ies to block DSL lines. IMHO they have no right to say who can own a mailserver and who not.
      I have not implemented the changes yet, and I called the system administrators at work to indicate what they were doing and there

  • Grumble (Score:2)

    by ces ( 119879 )
    Well for what it's worth my email and the email of a few friends who are co-hosted on the same box don't seem to be having any problems with bounces from large providers.

    The IP range we are in is properly marked as belonging to our provider but it doesn't seem to be flagged as being a DSL line. Also it doesn't appear that their dynamic IP range is flagged either.

    Of course it doesn't hurt that we have proper matching forward and reverse records for the mail machine. I suspect that it helps that my ISP whil

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