On Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:20:56 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Be very careful which blacklists you use. Most are utter rubbish and don't check what they list or offer enough information to actually be able to get support staff of the listed ISP to fix the problem. It's very annoying getting bounced because some over-zealous blacklist decided to include the whole hosting provider/hosting facility/ISP/uplink/country/world after one email to a honeypot address from a clueless person's web form or autoreply.
I've also discovered that some MTAs will not accept mail should a blacklist entity disapear. This leads to legitimate mail being rejected and lots of red faces all round.
I agree with Mark - those blacklists that seem to derive pleasure from blocking an entire ISP don't do the anti-spam cause any good and should not be used wherever possible.
Increasingly, UK providers seem to be silently junking email and a few (BT-Yahoo, Demon and Frees^WWannad^WFrance Telecom, I'm looking at you) seem to be getting it very wrong occasionally.
This is plain wrong, IMHO. Let the end-user do the filtering. People who have separate web hosting away with their ISPs now usually have something within their control panels (I certainly do on my 'service') that will enable/disable spam filtering and customise it to their needs. The same should go for ISPs too.
This is precisely the problem I had with a company called Donhost. They were silently (i.e. not disclosing to their customers) filtering all Yahoo Groups mail which somewhat made the missus and myself somewhat miffed. They soon lost a customer, I can tell you! And this is now why I have my deciated server and don't use shared hosting anymore.
Regards,
Martyn