I've had a complaint filed against me by EliteHosts for sending viruses via e-mail, although it's easily demonstrated it's one of their customers who's to blame. The only reason my mail server sent a virus was because it's a bounceback of a virus sent to us by the complainant (or someone joe-jobbing their e-mail address). It's not our responsibility to clean e-mails that we're returning verbatim in failure messages.

With dumb mail systems making seemingly automated complaints like this, perhaps everyone should turn off 'undeliverable' messages and break the e-mail system even more? I've responded to the issue swiftly with my own ISP, so hopefully I won't get my server(s) disconnected (or worse). As a result I am blocking EliteHosts' entire IP class (209.67.0.0/24) from all of my servers for having such a dumb system that gets small sysadmins like me into unnecessary trouble.

Just so I have it noted down, here's the mail header they're claiming proves that "I" am sending them viruses..

Received: from server.feed***.com (server.feed***.com [67.15.192.**])
by mailin-02.elitehosts.com (8.12.11/8.11.6) with ESMTP id kAKJ6v0v023776
for < http-users1@web-1hosting.net> ; Mon, 20 Nov 2006 14:06:58 -0500
Received: from mailnull by server.feed***.com with local (Exim 4.52)
id 1GmETm-0008QX-9c
for http-users1@web-1hosting.net; Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:06:54 +0000
X-Failed-Recipients: **non-existent-user-at-my-end**@server.feed***.com
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
From: Mail Delivery System < Mailer-Daemon@server.feed***.com>
To: http-users1@web-1hosting.net
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

Anyone with experience of SMTP will recognize this is the header from an 'undeliverable mail' bounceback (from the server and the X-Failed-Recipients header. Furthermore, the destination is http-users1@web-1hosting.net implying that the original mail was caused by a broken mail form (or PHP script) at 'web-1hosting.net' (hosted by EliteHosts).. so it should be them getting their ass kicked, not me.

I've long felt that the e-mail system is the biggest pile of trash on the Internet (despite e-mail itself being so great) and the power that stupid complaints like this have over ISPs is a demonstration of that. Everyone's so touchy about spam nowadays that even when you run a totally secure and legit e-mail server, as I do, you can still get the finger pointed at you. Such complaints never arise in regards to the Web or other protocols. It'd be excellent if we could scrap SMTP and go with something else.