->->I've been setting up IREX 2.29 as a UUCP email server..

->Well, the problem wasn't with IREX at all, but with Verizon.

I wrote a letter to the Verizon regional office in Boston, MA.  I explained
the problem and mentioned it was a material change of conditions without
notice.  The letter was pleasant, but firmly requested port 25 be restored to
the condition that existed when I made the deal.  A couple of days later
- again without notice - port 25 suddenly became unblocked again.  It's been
working fine.

About a week later I got a call from a very nice Verizon rep, and I had a
pleasant conversation.  I explained my use of the port, and that there was no
intent of any unsolicited commercial email. (UCE)  She left her number and
email address in case there is any further problem.

Had this been a residential account, I probably wouldn't have gotten
anywhere.  But, it's a business account with a static IP.

FWIW, I have two domain names working through IREX right now, tossing to two
separate conferences on the Wildcat 4 BBS.  I had to modify a name checking
program I use as part of a spam filter.  It detects the domain name and moves
it to the appropriate inbound folder.  Outbound is checked so that only mail
from whitelisted accounts goes out.  So far it's been working well.

The second part of the spam filter does a match with key whitelisted or
blacklisted words in a database.  When it finds a match it either passes the
message on without further checking, or adds it to a delspam.bat file that
runs before any inbound mail is tossed.  These are programs I wrote, and AFAIK
they are the only spam filtering that works with UUCP.  If anyone is
interested, let me know.  I will give you the files to run it, plus the Visual
Basic source code.  It requres a database file, and .INI file to run, the .EXE
itself, a sort utility that puts the most common hits in the beginning part of
the database, and a database edit utility to add/delete/modify entries in the
.DAT file.

Since IREX is configured to reject any names not on the Users list, the
connect count has dropped significantly from the previous host. I think the
spammers recognize when an SMTP server rejects their mail and they remove it
from the list to make their mailing more efficient.  In this case, IREX has
done a great job.

Craig Healy
Chowdanet BBS
Providence, RI

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