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vsnl refuses smtp relay and linux box at home suffers



On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Sanjeev Gupta wrote:

> I assume you want to read mails in your box on a Linux machine, 

that brought tears in my eyes, in fond memory of the days i could happily
send and receive mails from my linux box. 'cos you see, since independence
day, i have been prohibited from sending mail from my linux box at home. i
can receive (i.e. pop3 them) but i can't use smtp relay.

my isp is vsnl, and they want all "From:" fields to say vsnl.net.in or
vsnl.com. else no relay. that's why this email has a fictitious user@bom7
blah blah.

when called, their helpdesk engineers ask me "Outlook or netscape?" (sort
of like "veg or non veg?". i said "pine". they said shell a/c cannot be
used from home. i said no, no, no,.. i have a tcp/ip account but i use
pine from a linux box. they said your from id must be a vsnl id. but that
can just be faked, i said. no more questions they said.. 

ouch! anti spam policies are hurting genuine vsnl linux-at-home users. is
that the same story with other isp's? 

oh well... i guess i will survive.

oh, btw don't bother replying to the "From:" address. use "Reply-To"
instead. i've put it in my .sig too.

-akr