[H-GEN] Bigpond outgoing mail problems

[Tony Nugent]

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On Tue Jul 08 2003 at 16:32, Stuart Longland wrote:

> Harry wrote:
> | Has anyone had experience with this problem? Has Bigpong[1] configured their
> | mail server wrong?
> 
> I think Bigpond has a limit to how much email you can send in one hit --
> your 300-odd emails might be over that limit.  I believe this is to help
> prevent SPAM.

Yes, it's true... I had this issue hit me in the face last year when
they "upgraded" their mail servers which were "now conforming to the
latest rfc standards", which state a limit of 100 recpients per
message.  (Sorry, I can't recall exactly which rfc, but it is a more
recent one).

I have *had* to make it work to send email from a mailing list that
included over 1800 bigpond recipient addresses, so (after much
frantic research at the time) I ended up configuring sendmail to
limit each message to 99 recipients.  The end effect is that the
same message gets sent to groups of 99 telstra/bigpong recipients at
a time in 20-odd batches.

  It is certainly designed an anti-spam measure.  But what a joke,
  so much spam gets relayed through them anyway, they have a
  reputation for it.  They are acting as a secondary MX for one
  domain that I manage (not my choice), viruses and especially spam
  frequently arrive via the telstra relay servers.  Heck, you'd wish
  that they would at least bother to filter for and then drop the
  mass mailer viruses.  And spammers often deliberately target
  secondary MX hosts to help avoid direct detection and rejection,
  thereby generating bounces instead (heh, if it doesn't get to the
  intended recipient then what the hell... *someone* ends up with
  it).

It is a problem for people mailing to large contact lists via their
windows/outlook address books.  You cannot control this
automatically with outrage/excess, so you have to manually set this
up... the solution is to re-group all the email addresses in the
address book into several smaller email aliases (or "contact
groups") each with under 100 recipients, then send the same messate
to one group at a time (and as Bcc recipients please!)

For solving my own problem, the mailing list is a (protected) alias
pointing to an include file on the linux box running sendmail.  (The
contents of that include file can be easily managed).

At home (with bigpong adsl) I post my outgoing email directly to the
destination MX server rather than via bigpong's smtp relays.
Recently this has started to bite me... I'm getting an increasing
number of rejects because the telstra IP address I have been
(dynamically) allocated was blacklisted, known to have belonged to
an open relay at some point.  <sigh>  It's interesting that there
were (still are?) threats to introduce an rfc to specifically ban
telstra (along with a small number of other large ISPs) because
their IPs have been known to be sources of much spam abuse.

> | Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |

Cheers
Tony

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