tlug: Re: Test messages: Where's good?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Howard" == Howard Abbey <habbey@example.com> writes:

    Howard> Does anybody have any suggestion on where to mail /
    Howard> otherwise test a outgoing mail setup?  I've had my box
    Howard> configured so it would send mail to TLUG and certain
    Howard> people nicely, but would get quietly dumped in /dev/null
    Howard> in security / spam fearfull places.

System-level spam blocks that dump it in /dev/null are inexcusable.
They should refuse politely with an error message or refuse the
connection.

Probably your mail was conformant, the spam block was in error.
There's nothing you can do about that, and there's no way to test for
it because the standards for well-formed mail pass most spam.

    Howard> A couple of times I didn't know for weeks that all the
    Howard> mail I was sending wasn't getting through.  Not fun, and I
    Howard> don't want it to happen again next time I rework my
    Howard> system.

I'm not sure what you did wrong; I would suspect that you may have
fallen afoul of the stupid smail smtp_hello_verify default.  (It
checks to make sure that the host named in HELO exists in the DNS.
This is stupid because spammers go through other machines; it's rare
for a spammer to waste his own bandwidth by contacting you directly.
On the other hand, it's very common for somebody using a Windose
mailer---or a new Linux user---to be misconfigured.)

If that's so you may have retries stuck in your own queue.  It's
tricky to configure smail to do the retries, dunno sendmail.  Running
a cleanup process once a day or so by a cron job works well enough.

    Howard> I guess the best would be a free mail forwarding service
    Howard> that bounces not perfect looking mail back with an error
    Howard> message.  Is there such a place?

Not that I know of.  Might be a good tlug project ;-)

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