Subject: Serious problem with bell-labs hosted mailing lists

From: Scott Petrack <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 22:55:40 -0400 (EDT)

Scott,

As the letter below shows, bell-labs seems to block or delete mail sent
directly from an smtp server which lives on a dial-up link. My laptop runs
this way, as does a large number of other peoples. This is pretty much a
necessity, because I travel a great deal and have many different ISPs for
different parts of the world, and the only SMTP server I can rely on
sending my mail is my own.

I am writing to you because:

	a) I am pretty angry -- I have no idea for how long my posts to
iptel, pint, and pin have been blocked, if at all.
	b) Although bell-labs is free to use such a policy, I believe that
this means that they have to stop hosting open IETF mailing lists. 

If there is an IETF policy on this issue, I'd appreciate a pointer. And if
you happen to know an SMTP server which is willing to relay for me
whereever I happen to be, I appreciate a pointer to that too.

Sorry to be a pain, I just feel totally stumped by this. It's 5am in some
wacko time zone, and now I have to find a relay SMTP server just to
post to some bell-labs lists. :-(.

Scott P.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 17:25:44 -0500
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]

as you've probably noticed, we are now blocking direct
mail access sent from dial-up ip addresses.  i'm sorry,
but your reply to me on march 10 was deleted (i accidentally
sent from a subdomain with stronger filters).

i'll briefly summarize our policy as, after we
have been spammed from a dial-up subnet, we no longer
accept mail from it.  a longer discussion of this is
at http://maps.vix.com/dul; we don't use their database,
but they describe the problem better than i can.

i suggest that you configure your mailer to relay through
your isp's mail relay.  i notice that we sometimes receive
mail from you sent from the 207.155.252 and 207.155.252
subnets, which i believe host some of concentric's mail servers.
the 194.158.101 subnet, which you occasionally use, is also safe.

if you have questions, please send them to me from a
system on one of the subnets listed above, or any
other non-dial port.  i apologize for losing your
earlier message and not being able to warn you sooner.

bob flandrena

[email-masked]
[email-masked]

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This message came from the IETF PINT Working Group Mailing List.

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From: [email-masked] (Igor Faynberg)
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 13:34:55 -0400

Scott,

I have asked our web master, Tom Limoncelli, to respond to your complaint.
In the future, please feel free to ask him directly (his link is on the
PINT page). He is a seasoned internaut, and I find his services outstanding.

As for your messages, I believe I got all of them.  I was not aware of
any policy blocking dial-up messages (and I myself sent a few while dialing
up--all of them were delivered), but I would not be surprised if something
like that happened in light of the virus that had attacked many Lucent
servers last week.

Igor

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