makeko: SMTP-mostly

This letter from a colleague of ours brought the Verizon thing to our attention in July. So we set up our first SMTP-mostly account at that time. As the days went on, we had a few other friends, clients, and co-workers tell us about their troubles with the whole stinky mess. So we soon found we were doing this more and more and more. After the thing went into effect on the 8th, we decided that we could actually open it up and help out some other folks, maybe.

(back to the SMTP-mostly introduction)

From: "Michael Abram"
To: "Marnie Ann Joyce"
Subject: TPC strikes again
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 00:02:43 -0400

Hi Marnie,

I'm pretty sure you don't remember "The President's Analyst", a 1967 comedy starring James Coburn, but at the end, the dastardly villain is revealed as TPC -- The Phone Company. The lovely Verizon has found yet another way to torture me, as if the four months of daily calls to get my DSL working in the first place weren't enough.

In one month from now, their SMTP servers will not relay any mail whose sender's domain name is not one of their own (verizon.net, ba.net, bellatlantic.net). They say this is to stop spam, but if they really wanted to stop spam they would just force authentication. As it will be, any spammer can just say their address is imanaughtyspammer@verizon.net and the filter is useless. The real reason (for all you conspiracy theorists out there) is that Verizon wants to sell their "managed messaging" services, which aren't subject to the domain restriction.

When I emailed them, Verizon suggested I put [an address using my own domain] in the Reply-To: field -- that works if that's what you want -- if the recipient of such a message has Outlook Express (for example) and clicks "Reply", the reply will be sent to the Reply-To: address, but that really is not the point at all. When the recipient reads the original message, he sees the From: -- my address would be shown as xxxxxxx@bellatlantic.net, not [an address using my own domain] -- if he cuts and pastes my addy, it's the wrong one.

So I put all my begs in one ask-it, and ask you to quote me a price for using your SMTP server for my outgoing mail [...] that wouldn't care if my outgoing mail has [an address using my own domain] or [an address using my other domain] or a.student.from.nyu@nyu.edu (my wife will have the same problem) on it. My outgoing volume would be in the low tens of messages per day, and would never mass-mail of course. I don't need a POP account.

Michael
www.michaelabram.com

(back to the SMTP-mostly introduction)