On Wednesday 30 June 2004 23:20, 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.
Yes, sorry I should of made that clearer, Like you I personally dislike most of the blacklist services out there. maybe they are ok to be used as a weighting on a rule filter but that's about it.
You are not dependant on your isp's mail relay, Anybody here who is on Demon for example can verify how annoying it is to have delayed or lost mail as a result of your ISP's SMTP service not responding in a timely fashion.
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.
Ahh you have noticed that too. BT's service is strange as it seems to change configuration on a daily basis.
Demon were pretty awful last year, had all sorts of problems with some of my clients. Demon's "punt" servers just didn't respond half the time. Worse still Demon (for the accounts my clients had anyway) wouldn't let us change MX records around to bypass their joke of a system. So far this year, things appear to have been a bit better.
I remember on a number of occasions sitting there with timeouts while trying to connect to port 25 of their relays, At the same time some nut on their helldesk would be trying to tell me there was no problem their end.
Plusnet at least seem to be pretty good, You can even configure the MX (along with a fallback relay) to point to your IP address, all from the account webadmin interface. So far I haven't bothered for myself, but it's nice that I at least have the facility.