If you're reading this, you probably got this URL from a mail server error message, and it's likely that two things are true:

1) your mail server got rejected by our mail server because our mail server thought your mail server was on a dynamic IP address, and therefore was probably not a mail server at all, but rather a virus infected spam or attack bot, and

2) your mail server, which may or may not be on a dynamic IP address, probably isn't virus infected, but in any event, you were really trying to send some legitimate mail and your server shouldn't have been blocked.

This seems likely because you're you, and you're reading this, and, even though those virus bots see pretty much the same message that you saw, they don't come read this page. Sure they don't. But you did.


Mostly likely then, we should say sorry, and please contact us at the "info" address of the domain you were trying to send to, or if that doesn't work, of spamgourmet.com, and let us know what's going on, and we can exempt your server from the check.

Why is this happening? Well, in the fall of 2006, our mail server started getting hit by many, many bots that did nothing but grab a connection and try to hold it as long as they could by issuing do-nothing commands to avoid time-out disconnection, and this was making it so that "real" mail servers had to try very hard to get through, and delivery of real mail was really slow, and our users complained, and we were bummed out. Now things are better. The bots are still at it, and some of them get through, but the somewhat draconian rules we put in place have stopped the *vast* majority of them, and our service is pretty much running OK now. So hopefully you understand. If we didn't have the rules that blocked your server, it's likely that your server wouldn't have been able to get through in a reasonable time anyway, and you wouldn't even have a nice apologetic web page to read about it.

We know this is irritating. We get really irritated when something like this happens to us. If you're wondering what generated the error, figure out the IP address of your mail server and do a "reverse lookup" to see what it comes back as. If that has a bunch of numbers and dots or dashes in it (like "myhost.32-21-128-someblock.example.com"), then that's why. Most ISPs configure their dynamic IP addresses to have hostnames like that. There's no blocklist involved, and nobody is accusing you or anyone you're associated with of sending spam -- this is simply a defense against a very effective attack. We will whitelist your server whether you change the reverse lookup or not, but if you want to change it, contact your ISP to get a "PTR" record established for your server with the hostname that you want to use. I've never heard of an ISP that wouldn't do this for free upon request.

So, sorry, and hope to hear from you soon. And if you really are a virus bot that wants to get through anyway, then we'll know when we're talking to you, because we'll ask really hard questions that you can't answer, you dumb virus bot.