On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 1:46 AM, Keith Wright wrote:

I don't use Speakeasy web mail, but if I don't forward through Speakeasy, too much mail gets rejected out of hand, just because it comes from a dsl line. (I think. (It's been a while since I tried it, and you never know exactly why you have been rejected.))

If that's the reason your mail gets rejected, it's pretty cheap to get yourself a domain name without hosting or co-lo. -- Rich

From: "Chaim The Squirrel Keeper"

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 1:46 AM, Keith Wright wrote:

...

mail gets rejected out of hand, just because it comes from a dsl line.

If that's the reason your mail gets rejected, it's pretty cheap to get yourself a domain name without hosting or co-lo.

I send mail from a computer in my basement through a DSL line. There is no "hosting" or "co-lo" as I understand those terms, so I don't see the relevance of your comment. -- Keith

From: "Chaim The Squirrel Keeper"

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Keith Wright wrote:

...

...

From: "Chaim The Squirrel Keeper"

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 1:46 AM, Keith Wright wrote:

mail gets rejected out of hand, just because it comes from a dsl line.

If that's the reason your mail gets rejected, it's pretty cheap to get yourself a domain name without hosting or co-lo.

I send mail from a computer in my basement through a DSL line. There is no "hosting" or "co-lo" as I understand those terms, so I don't see the relevance of your comment.

The relevance is just that you don't need those extra-cost services to get a domain name. When you get a domain name, and set up your MX, reverse DNS, and other records properly, other mail servers recognize your mail server as being part of a legitimate domain instead of just an anonymous user of an ISP's IP address pool.

Yes, that's a good idea. That's why I did it about four years ago. It works well, maybe sending mail through Speakeasy is not really necessary, but I seem to remember that I had a problem with rejected mail when I sent it from my own machine. Maybe something else was wrong, but it's not too broken now, so I don't fix it. -- Keith PS: The answer to the original question was that I use SPF for outgoing mail, but not incoming. It works, but maybe anything else would work as well. Maybe something else would work better. Outgoing SPF requires setting up a Domain Name Server. Once that works it's easy. Example zone records were in the original answer. Incoming SPF reqires setting up an SMTP server. Even after the SMTP server is working, setting up SPF is fairly complicated. Maybe there is a distribution that does most of the setup for you.

From: Richard Klein

Hmm... Have you ever called Speakeasy and asked them to set up reverse DNS for you? I seem to recall that's something they have to do on their end.

Yes. As I said, that was all done years ago. Though actually I never called them. It was done via email. You might think that answering email would be the basic entry level requirement, the sine qua non/nada/zilch, that any moron would learn to do before becoming an ISP. Sadly, most Idiot Service Providers seem to be totally unable to answer email from customers. They are only interested in phone calls from people who have no email. Speakeasy has someone who knows what is and who answers email at 2am Sunday faster than most of them can get an sales droid to pick up the phone during business hours. Anyway, I run a primary name server while they run a couple of secondaries and reverse DNS. I think I may have an officially "dynamic" IP address, but it was set up before DHCP. Speakeasy gave me an address when I signed up and since then neither of us have had any reason to touch it. -- Keith

-----Original Message----- From: Doug Chamberlin

Except that, as Keith has experienced, and as I have also experienced, some systems recognize the sending IP address as coming from a block of known dynamically assigned addresses and reject the messages/connections even though all the domain info has been set up correctly. I have used TZO's services to work around this in the past. Highly recommended.

Ah, right. I forgot about that. I haven't run into that problem because I have a static IP address. -- Rich