OT: Political Spam - what can you do about it?

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 23:30, Nifty Hat Mitch wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 04:33:55PM -0500, redhat wrote:
> > Tom,
> > You have really hit the nail on the head.  Being a public utility we are
> > under different constraints than a normal ISP.  This one reason why I
> > did not post a response to many of the other replies to my initial
> > letter.  Most people do not understand that we cannot just "turn off" a
> > customer like a regular ISP can.
> 
> Nor can you reject mail from major ISPs the way that
> Paul's service can ;-).
>   http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/
> Interesting....

Indeed, this is a great advantage of running my own mail server. Since
I'm only providing mail for me, my family and a couple of friends, I can
do things that a real ISP couldn't even consider, like refuse mail from
all non-whitelisted senders at major ISPs with non-functioning
postmaster addresses (e.g. sbcglocal.net, rr.com), huge 419 problems
(e.g. tiscali.co.uk) etc. I can only do this because the range of
correspondents I need to be able to deal with is strictly limited and I
can handle the whitelisting requirements. So, for instance, being in the
UK I have to deal with lots of people at big UK ISPs with broken
postmaster addresses (e.g. virgin.net), so I whitelist the ISP from the
postmaster check, but for US ISPs, where the number of correspondents is
much smaller, I can afford to individually whitelist addresses.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>