administrivia, back from vacation AND -important- upcoming mailer upgrade

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

i'm back, and will be trying to catch up on my email from the past 9 days
over the next week. i have some 481 new messages on krusty, and rather a lot
more than that over on my old wizvax account. it may take a while.

we will be upgrading the Mail Transport Agent on krusty sometime over the
next several weeks (probably towards the end of January); we will be moving
from exim 1.70 to exim 1.81 (unless a new patch release for 1.8x comes out
before then.)

exim 1.8x comtains a major new spam control feature which i plan to use; it
supports the "MAPS RBL". MAPS stands for Mail Abuse Protection System; RBL
stands for Realtime  Blackhole List. sites which generate substantial spam
and which don't appear to be making any genunine effort shut it down get
added to the RBL after repeated violations and no response to complaints;
the upgraded mail system will in realtime fetch the lists of problem sites
and use it to filter incoming email for spam. for more information on the
MAPS RBL see  <http://maps.vix.com/rbl/>

why is this important? because the bad attitude of netcom management and
poor handling of abuse complaints have gotten netcom put onto the RBL (note
that netcom's abuse department itself, all two employees, is badly
overloaded and not responsible for the problems; they are apparently
operating under a heavy management thumb). while netcom does kill accounts
used to generate spam, they continue to run open mail relays and they
continue to permit themselves to be be used as a "spam haven" (that is, they
host web sites and email drop boxes advertised widely in spam messages.)

once i put up exim 1.81, and turn on the RBL feature, netcom users will not
be able to contribute to the mailing lists from their regular netcom
accounts. this is unfortunate, but i have come to consider the battle
against spam to be a war indeed, and sometimes there are "civilian
casualties". i will give a couple of days warning before i turn the RBL
features on. this is not a choice i wanted to have to make, but the RBL is
too valuable a weapon in the war on spam for me to ignore it.

sigh,
  richard welty
  postmaster@domain.elided, postmaster@domain.elided
-- 
Richard Welty                                             518-783-9003 (days)
rwelty@domain.elided              http://www.krusty-motorsports.com/
welty@domain.elided (<== real job)        http://www.inet-solutions.net/