[isf-wifidog] Possible problem with Laika

[Aaron McCann]

Benoit Grégoire wrote:

>On Tuesday 08 March 2005 11:55, Michael Lenczner wrote:
>  
>
>>--- Benoit Grégoire <bock at step.polymtl.ca> wrote:
>>
>>Well, that's nice, but when i've sat with 15+ users to
>>sign up, I've seen that it often gets put in "junk
>>mail" by yahoo and by hotmail.
>>
>>So, it's probably not a question of whitelisted (which
>>no one does) or the IP address.  More likely it's the
>>content that gets flagged.
>>    
>>
>
>Oh, I just remembered that they both now allow you to report mail as spam.  So 
>it just takes one idiot who did it and we are toast.  There is very little we 
>can do about it, except ask our users to take the pain to actually mark it as 
>non-spam.
>
>  
>
I don't think that it is because someone reported it as spam OR the 
content.  The email that are sent (at least with my default install) 
contain nothing that would be picked up by a spam filter, and it would 
take many users (hundreds or thousands) to report the exact same message 
as spam before the ISP does anything about it.  What happens most of the 
time with messages marked as spam (at least with SBC, Yahoo, and 
probably others) is that messages like the one you mark will be scored 
higher or marked as spam in the future for *your mailbox only*.

I think the problems you are getting are because of the IP your auth 
server has.  Most big ISPs/webmail outfits are using DNS/IP pool based 
blacklists to help lighten the load on their incoming mail servers.  
Basically, if they receive email (sometimes just an SMTP connection) 
from a machine with an IP out of a dynamic pool (dialup or not static 
cable/DSL modems) they either drop the mail or mark it as spam.  Another 
thing some have started doing is reverse DNS lookups, but it's fairly 
rare as it's expensive (time wise) on a busy server.

Is your auth server on a dynamic IP address?  If so, that is what I 
think the problem is.  What I've used to work around the problem for my 
personal site is to relay all outgoing mail through my ISPs SMTP 
server.  Really easy to set up and cured all my problems with being 
marked as spam instantly.  Now, nothing gets marked as bad because it's 
coming from a large trusted orginazition.  Perhaps this helps.

Aaron