ah the world of spam. it is amazing to me how many people actually continue to click links that arrive
in spam. if people stopped clicking the links would the spam disappear? i doubt it..

so anyway, i use zaep on my servers (for my accounts) to reduce spam. my email clients
are configured to send and retrieve through zaep. when someone sends me an email, they are immediately replied
to by the system, which sends them an email with a link to click (this only needs to be done once). when i check
my email, my client cannot see the email until they have clicked that link. once they have been added to my “whitelist”
i can view emails from them without interruption. when i send emails to people, if they are not already, zaep will
add them to my list.

so zaep connects to people’s mailservers, but rather than identifying itself properly, it would only use
the ip address, which constantly caused me to get (re)listed in the
cbl spammer database. while it /is/ easy enough to get unlisted,
it became a huge pain. and with more and more companies/universites using the lists, emails from my servers
were constantly getting blocked.

i was finally able to suss out the problem (with the help of phil from the cbl), and had to purchase an upgrade
to zaep, which fixed the identification problem. it sucks i had to dish out money that i was not planning on,
but it is nice that the problem is solved, and my servers are no longer being blacklisted.

i really do recommend zaep, though. ever since i implemented it, my spam has dropped
to literally nothing.