Email Thoughts 2 (reply to Tomasino and Sean) --------------------------------------------- Thanks to both Tomasino [1] and Sean (email) for your super-helpful comments and suggestions. Tomasino, I like your idea of only allowing outbound connections to whitelisted hosts, more-or-less for the same idea that I like the idea of a gopherspace-specific mail system. Of course, as you said, this doesn't make much sense for my (currently) single-user server. In my case I suppose it makes more sense I think to maintain a whitelist of servers from whom incoming connections are allowed. The difficulty would be in maintaining this list though... Sean, sadly I can't reply to your email directly since, as I mentioned in the last post, my bespoke mail server software doesn't yet support outbound connections. However, from what both you and Tomasino say it sounds like I've been a bit too paranoid about thelambdalab.xyz winding up on blacklists, particularly as I'm really only interested in sending the occasional mail to other gophers. (And to be honest, I don't really care if Google blacklists my server.) So if I have some time this weekend I'll implement a system for outbound connections from lambdamail and just hope that the combination of SPF, DMARC and properly-configured reverse DNS is enough. (It seems I'll also have to implement proper handling of SMTP 4xx responses: thanks for the heads up on this, Sean.) Thanks again for all the help! --- [1]: gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20190827-re-lambdalab-email-thoughts