A New URL
 Figure 1. This is the pop-up window that appeared when I attempted to send the e-mail through Verizon's SMTP servers. The e-mail contained one URL from the dyndns.com domain. That was apparently enough to set off their filter. |
As I pointed out before, the wife and I had an issue with Comcast. Namely, their internet connectivity was unreliable. That and the fact that they were not willing to give us similar television channels as Verizon for the same price. We switched to Verizon and things have been fine, with one exception.
I found out yesterday that Verizon has lousy spam filters on their outgoing SMTP servers. I tried to send an e-mail to a friend and I included a link to this web site using the standard, dyndns.com URL, which was (and is) http://site2241.dyndns-home.com. When I hit the "Send" button on Thunderbird, I got a pop-up message from Verizon's SMTP server stating, "An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: 5.7.1 The message you attempted to send was determined to be spam." I won't go through the epithets I swore on Verizon and their "spam filters"; suffice to say that I don't think highly of them. At all. Especially considering the fact that this was the first e-mail I had sent in five days. You'd think that a spam filter would have a volume rule. If the volume didn't hit some threshold, then let it go.
I don't know much about how spammers do their evil work. Verizon obviously believes that if the words "dyndns" are in the URL, it must be spam. To get around this problem, and not just with Verizon, this morning I registered the URL "www.site2241.net". That's where you can now find this website, along with the (still functional) http://site2241.dyndns-home.com.
UPDATE (12 October 2010): With thanks to "GaryDoug" and "somegirl" on the Verizon community forums, I now know that the problem was that Verizon's spam filters keyed on the term "dyndns-home" in the URL. Both "GaryDoug" and "somegirl" confirmed my problem. "somegirl" went so far as to begin slicing off parts of the URL until only "dyndns-home" was left. That small bit was enough to kick off their spam filter. "somegirl" speculated that Verizon received a boatload of spam with that in the URL, so they added it to their spam filter. It still doesn't answer my original question of why they don't invoke some kind of volume rule, but it was nice not to be ignored. Especially as snippy as I was on the forums.