At 12:24 AM -0700 6/13/02, Warren Michelsen  imposed structure on a 
stream of electrons, yielding:
>A client forwarded this to me:
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mail Administrator [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2002 7:52 PM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Mail System Error - Returned Mail
>
>
>This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:
>
>Your message was not delivered because the return address was refused.
>
>The return address was '<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>'
>
>Please reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>if you feel this message to be in error.
>
>Reporting-MTA: dns; mailhost1-chcgil.ameritech.net

That's the server that is reporting the delivery problem.

>Arrival-Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 19:47:05 -0500
>Received-From-MTA: dns; TRAVELER (67.39.172.238)

That's where the reporting server got the mail from

>Final-Recipient: RFC822; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Action: failed
>Status: 5.1.1
>Remote-MTA: dns; grits.valdosta.edu (168.18.130.246)

That's the machine that refused to accept the mail

>Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 We don't accept mail from spammers

And that's what grits said in rejecting it.

>-----end Original Message-----
>
>The above is abbreviated but the important stuff is there.
>
>It's not clear to me whether mailhost1-chcgil.ameritech.net refused
>to accept it for delivery because it didn't like the return address
>or whether  it got as far as grits.valdosta.edu, which suspects
>bzlaw.com of being a spammer. The presence of (seemingly) two error
>messages from two different MTAs has me scratching my noggin.
>
>Ameritech is the ISP for the office from which this was sent. And,
>no, bzlaw.com is not hosted, web or mail, on Ameritech's system.
>
>What's really going on here?

The Ameritech machine had the mail and tried to give it to 
grits.valdosta.edu, which didn't want it and said so before it even 
saw the recipient address, based (apparently) solely on the sender 
address and (maybe) the fact that it was coming from that Ameritech 
machine. Some MTA's are set to not accept mail from machines where 
the sender domain isn't detectably connected to the sending machine. 
Dumb idea, but people do it. It is also possible that 'grits' didn't 
like something else about the Ameritech machine, but that's hard to 
tell because the Ameritech machine seems to think that it's name is 
mailhost1-chcgil.ameritech.net, but mailhost1-chcgil.ameritech.net 
doesn't resolve. In fact, that alone could be the problem, and making 
such a check is not quite as silly as trying to figure out where 
people should be mailing from.

FWIW, as an Ameritech customer, I would advise anyone downstream of 
them to run their own mailserver, since the folks at Ameritech seem 
incapable of doing anything competently above network layer 2.


-- 
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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