>Here is the response one of my admin team got when asking why she was
>not getting message approvals or other admin type mail:
>
>--------
>   The mail is not being delivered because the mailserver for the domain
>MITVMA.MIT.EDU (pacific-carrier-annex.mit.edu) is in the ORBS
>database as being an open relay and therefore is not allowed to send mail
>to the Qwest.net domain.
>    Please refer to www.orbs.org for information on what ORBS is and
>what you can do to get the mailserver (ip address 18.69.0.28) out of
>the listing.
>    In the meantime, you may want to open a free webbased email account
>for the purpose of exchanging mail with MIT.
>-------
>
>First of all, can someone explain to me in English what in the world they are
>talking about.

Basically a mail server that is an open relay will accept outgoing
mail from anywhere--for example if mail.example.edu is an open relay
then I (or anyone else) could use it to send mail to an aol.com
address (or any other address).  A standard trick of spammers is to
find a mail relay someplace and use it to send their spam--this can
make it more difficult to track them down and relieves them of the
time and trouble of maintaining a mail server of their own.

One tricky thing when closing an open relay is to make sure that
people who do need to be able to send mail using the server are still
able to.

ORBS maintains a database of sites that it has determined are open
relays.  For more information on them you can see their website; you
may also wish search the SPAM-L archives
(http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/spam-l.html) for ORBS.

>Second, does anyone have a solution besides the obvious.

Basically I'd verify that mitvma is in fact in ORBS.  (There should
be a link from ORBS' home page that allows you to do this.)  I have
occasionally been informed by mail admins that a mail server was in
ORBS when in fact it wasn't and the mail wasn't being accepted for
some other reason.  After this your only real option is to explain
the situation to the affected subscribers and turn over whatever
information you have on the situation to your site administrator.

Ultimately it's up to individual sites to determine what mail they
accept and what they don't.  If your subscribers (who are presumably
paying customers) disagree with their ISP's policies of course they
may wish to complain.

>On the same note, HOTMAIL is either not delivering MITVMA Listserv
>messages, or MITVMA is not accepting HOTMAIL messages. So this
>freemail source is apparently not an option.  Anyone have an inside track
>on this?  HOTMAIL is recognizing my admin requests with APPLE server.
>
>Liz Marr

I'm not sure if hotmail subscribes to ORBS or not.  In hotmail
options there's a "Inbox Protection" feature that allows you to
filter certain types of mail into a "bulk mail" folder; if you have
that enabled you might want to turn it off to see what happens.
Generally in dealing with free email providers I find that progress
is more likely if you call them than if you send email, though it
tends to be frustratingly slow in either case.  It could also help to
have mail server log entries in hand that show that they are blocking
your email.  Again it may be easier or more appropriate for your
LISTSERV site manager to deal with this.

Also note that there are other free email providers around that may
serve your purposes, though of course it's annoying to have to
maintain a half dozen or so seperate email accounts.

I hope your situation is resolved soon.
--
Jacob Haller, Technical Support
L-Soft international, Inc
http://www.lsoft.com/