[ale] Fun with BellSouth, AOL and SMTP

[James CE Johnson]

David Corbin wrote:

>Good try, but incorrect.  James has had that setup for many months.  
>
Yes. Forgive me for my late-night and incomplete post :-)

Sometime yesterday I started seeing things like this in my postfix logs:

Jun 28 23:14:08 geek postfix/smtp[19031]: 57EE023302: 
to=<MySelf at my.work.address>, 
relay=mx01.mail.bellsouth.net[205.152.59.33], delay=0, status=bounced 
(host mx01.mail.bellsouth.net[205.152.59.33] said: 550 .net 022: Your 
current IP address is not allowed to relay to equifax.com Solution: 
Connect using BellSouth Internet Service.)

This is with 'relayhost=mail.bellsouth.net' in /etc/postfix/main.cf.

Since that meant *no* email is going out, I removed the relayhost entry 
and now I can send mail to, apparently, anywhere other than AOL and 
hotmail. (Not that that's really a *bad* thing but I do have a number of 
locally hosted mailing lists with AOL and hotmail members.)

I swapped a few emails with BS support (and I must say I'm very 
impressed that (a) they were working late on a Saturday night and that 
(b) they seemed to be much more clueful than most first-line tech 
support I've swapped emails with) and they confirmed that 
mail.bellsouth.net is no longer relaying mail unless the From or 
Reply-To header ends with @bellsouth.net.

David is still relaying happily and we compared IPs. We're definately in 
different subnets and I recall that my connection bounced sometime 
Friday. So, my theory is that they probably changed their policy 
recently but haven't removed the "old addresses" from the list of 
ok-to-relay and that my Friday bounce put me into a new address block 
that isn't in that old list.

I'm currently seeking a non-BS host that will relay email to AOL and 
hotmail for the handful of domains for which I process email. With luck 
I'll have something going in a day or two...

>Bellsouth 
>support is now telling him that they won't relay email that isn't from 
>bellsouth.net or has a reply-to of bellsouth.net.  This would really suck. 
>
I'll be happy to post the BS responses if anyone is interested.

> 
>However, I have the same set up, and (so far, fingers crossed) I do not have a 
>problem
>
Maybe they just like you more :-)

>
>David
>
>On Sunday 29 June 2003 12:52, Jim Kinney wrote:
>  
>
>>You need to adjust the "smart_host" setting in sendmail to use the smtp
>>provided by your ISP. It is a anti-spam feature that helps track spammers.
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I'm looking for a sanity check here from anyone else with BellSouth DSL
>>>service.
>>>
>>>Tonight I started seeing this kind of thing in my mail logs:
>>>host mx00.mail.bellsouth.net[205.152.59.32] said: 550 .net 022: Your
>>>current IP address is not allowed to relay to hotmail.com Solution:
>>>Connect using BellSouth Internet Service.
>>>
>>>I sent a note to dsl_help at bellsouth.net and they confirmed that they're
>>>no longer relaying email through mail.bellsouth.net.
>>>
>>>Unfortunately, AOL (and probably others) refuses to allow incoming email
>>>from dynamically assigned IPs:
>>>
>>>telnet some.aol.mail.host 25
>>>554- (RTR:DU)  The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a
>>>dynamic 554- (residential) IP address.  AOL will not accept future e-mail
>>>transactions
>>>554- from this IP address until your ISP removes this IP address from
>>>its list
>>>554- of dynamic (residential) IP addresses.  For additional information,
>>>554  please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
>>>
>>>So what's a fella to do?
>>>
>>>Has anyone else tripped over this yet?
>>>

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