I am progressing with the development of this site.  There are lots of ideas afoot and its great that I can actually go downstairs and see the machine that drives the show.

So my latest update is a contact form to allow you to send me a message.  For obvious reasons I don’t want to put my email address in plain text, so a contact form makes sense.  It was easy enough to add, but an absolute pain to chuff to get working.

So the WordPress scripts send the email, yes? Not quite, it needs a local email server to do so.  So I installed “PostFix” on the server and configured it.  To test it I sent a simple test email to my PlusNet account.  Didn’t work.  Ahhh, need to open port 23 from the firewall, easily done.  Try again, still didn’t work.  Why?

To answer that question I found myself in the depths of a returned email in the email server.  I discovered this –

Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Sender rejected. IP is DNSBL listed –
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=80.229.245.122

What is this devilry? What it reduces to is this.  PlusNet don’t want me to run a mail server.  They “could” stop me by blocking ports 23 and 110, but no.  What they have actually done is registered all their customers IP addresses as Spammers, so they are blocked world wide!

Well, that’s not very nice!

So I have requested that spamhaus remove my IP address from the list, which they have.  This could go a number of ways –

1. The service starts working and we are happy.
2. PlusNet get wind of this and shut the door again.
3. PlusNet get really annoyed and contact me for an ear wigging.
4. PlusNet kill my service.

I think it will work.

Update

It’s working, so option 1 prevails.  You can send me messages now!!

“Dave, you stink!!”

Yeah, well, perhaps a little more constructive please.  I have a bath at least once a year you know.

I wonder if PlusNet will notice my sorcery…..