I recognize that spam is a big problem on the Internet.  At work, I'm responsible for manually reviewing all the messages that the server filters catch (propose idea of filtering | boss paranoid about losing important messages | lowest cost employee → me).  And I can tell you it's no fun going through thousands of drug, sex, phishing, and pirated media messages each week (just to find that someone's subscription to "Headline News" got caught this week…).  Although, if you're feeling particularly humane this week, and just really want to help those Nigerians get that cash out of the country, just drop me a line and I can see about hooking you up with plenty of addresses to contact…

 

Anyway, I KNOW that spam is a problem.  But I still think it's kinda extreme to just block all DHCP addresses.  Especially when there's no way for someone to get off the list.  Which is exactly what SORBS does.  Oh, and to top it off they make you go through one of those CAPTCHA things that's hard as hell for a human to read, but trivially beatable using AI techniques, to even find that that's the reason you've been getting NDR's for the last 2 days on all the messages from friends that you've been replying to!

 

So I got to spent hours fiddling around with Smart Host settings & DNS entries, then another hour to confirm that things at least looked like they were working securely.

 

On the bright side, it does look like the ridiculously complicated and convoluted method is actually working, so look forward to getting emails back from me in the future instead of sitting in the dark for a couple of weeks.