[ale] mail headers question

[Joe Steele]

On Friday, August 27, 2004, Geoffrey wrote:
>
> Geoffrey wrote:
> >
> > My expectation, which I'm about to test is, speedfactory will not permit
> > me to send email through their server with an email address that
> > reflects a domain that does not match the smtp server.  I'll let you
> > know what happens. :)
>
> Well, it worked, so my assumption was not correct.  Don't know that I
> understand it, other than the fact speedfactory knows the email is being
> sent from my static, therefore will permit it.

I think ISP's generally don't care what their customers use as a 
sender address (within reason).  Many people want to be able to use 
different sender addresses depending on the circumstances (whether 
they are responding to a business contact vs. a personal contact, for 
example).

There was just one more thing about this bounced message issue that I 
might point out.  You previously provided Earthlink's error message:

> foobar at mindspring.com:
>    550 Dynamic IPs/open relays blocked. Contact
> <openrelay at abuse.earthlink.net>.
>    command : mail
>    response: 550 Dynamic IPs/open relays blocked. Contact
> <openrelay at abuse.earthlink.net>.

My interpretation of this is that Earthlink rejected the message in 
response to the SMTP "mail from:" command.  This means that Earthlink 
rejected the message without even waiting to see who the recipient 
was or what the message content was.  In other words, Earthlink never 
saw the mail header containing your private IP address.  

For Earthlink to say that the message is rejected because "Dynamic 
IPs/open relays blocked" can only mean that they didn't want to do 
business with the 1and1 SMTP server.  It had nothing to do with the 
unseen message content.

--Joe