This site used to live on IX web hosting. I'm not sure what happened at IX, but 2009 hasn't been a good year for them. I ran six web sites there and they seemed to be  more down than up, or at least that's how it felt. My monitoring service suggested that towards the end they were as bad as 80% available on a week-by-week basis. That's bad enough, but even worse were their "customer services"

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or what to do if your web hosting company use weird anti-spam mechanisms and you can't convince their support people that there are better ways to do this.

1 the problem

It's standard to avoid open SMTP relays in order to make life harder for anonymous idiots sending spam through an ISP's servers. So everyone closes those SMTP ports, usually 25. That's a bit serious if you're a valid customer though, and you actually want to send your non-spam email. There are several approaches to letting you do that, including:

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