On 2012-08-05 22:06:53 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 03:58:19AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > > > But when the ISP's mail gateway is down or is blacklisted because of > > > > spammers, the users wouldn't know what to do. > > > > > > Of course they do. Call their ISP and complain to them to get it > > > fixed, or get a new ISP. > > > > This is a silly answer. Every ISP can have problems one time or > > another! > > Yeah, and most are very responsive when they do have problems, due to > the competetive nature of the ISP business (at least, here in North > America). Not only is it not a silly answer, it's the ONLY answer, at > least for most home users here.
I can tell you that in France, this is not the case. I don't know any ISP that has a 24/24 7/7 hotline to report problems on *their* side (but perhaps that's not the case in North America, where I was surprised to see shops open at night, something that is forbidden in France). I know that the staff of my ISP reads their newsgroups at night too, so that can be a way to report problems, but I don't think this is the case with the biggest ISP's here. And if gateways are blacklisted (which is not rare with my ISP, probably because this is a small ISP and it suffices to have one machine compromise to get the gateways blacklisted), the ISP can't do very much (the gateways change everyday because of that, but there still may be a 24-hour delay, and one drawback is that the changing IP address is also a problem with greylisting). My ISP also provides a gateway with spam filtering, so that it never gets blacklisted, but in case of false positive, the e-mail is dropped without any error message; this is not satisfactory either. However the solution that now works perfectly is direct SMTP. BTW, the people I know who can't send mail because of temporary failure of the gateway at their ISP don't call their ISP. They use Facebook or Yahoo, or ask me to send their e-mail from my machine for them. :) -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
