Today’s jihad

Today I wish hot fiery death upon my ISP, RoadRunner.

I send out a lot of email – I run several mailing lists on my home machine, and some of them are quite chatty. Over the last year or so, it seems like every day another ISP stops accepting email from me directly, because they’ve put in a filter to refuse email from sites on dynamic ips, because of the huge number of Windows idiots who get viruses. Every time that happens, I have to quickly add their domain to my /etc/postfix/transport file, where I specify that email to that domain goes through a relay on a site with a static IP (sometimes called a “smart-host”). Because I don’t trust RoadRunner any further than I could spit a rat, I’ve been relaying through Gradwell, since several of my web sites are hosted there.

The reasons why I don’t trust RoadRunner were lost in the mists of time, and so I suddenly decided that instead of sending all this email across the Atlantic to Gradwell in England, only to have them send it back across the Atlantic to most of the recipients. So I decided to start using my ISP’s outgoing mail server, smtp-server.rochester.rr.com. I figured that my “pipe” to this email sender would probably be pretty fat, and only one or two hops, and so things would probably go faster. And for a couple of days, it seemed to work fine. Test emails I sent to other accounts I have on other systems were delivered quite quickly, and I was congratulating myself for this latest move.

Until I woke up this morning. In my in-box were at least 30 bounce messages – I evidently triggered some sort of threshold filter on RoadRunner, and from about 30 minutes after I went to bed until midnight, every message sent through them got bounced with the following message:


550 5.7.1 Outbound Mail Refused - 66.66.104.210 - See http://help.rr.com/outboundemail - 040810)


If you actually go to the URL above, you’ll find that they bounced my email because they assumed that anybody sending that volume of email must be infected with a mail-sending virus. Only a couple of problems with that:

• I know of no virus in the world that sends out the payload through your smart-host – I thought they all send stuff out directly. That is why so many ISPs (including RoadRunner) refuse email from dynamic IPs, after all.
• Even the most minimal automatic inspection of the email going out would show that I WASN’T SENDING OUT ANY VIRUS PAYLOAD.

Of course, any competently administered ISP wouldn’t do such a thing, but if somebody were to cut off somebody’s outgoing email, don’t you think it would make sense to return a 4xx error code instead of a 550? That way the mail wouldn’t bounce, but would be queued to be retried after you fixed the problem. As an added bonus, no virus that I know of looks at error codes, so a 4xx would have the exact same effect as a 550 in that case.