Subject: Is our SMTP being throttled?

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 16:53:53 -0800

Dear support persons,

Yesterday I talked with your call screening "robot" and several support 
persons about why our SMTP  connection is not working normally.   When 
we send emails, SMTP is asking for the password immediately, and only 
modest numbers of messages are sent before the mail server asks for the 
password again.   The case IDs were 96547548 and later 96734480.

I was told it is possible that our email sending is being throttled 
because we are considered a spammer, but the helpline people did not 
have access to that information.  We were given your email address as a 
place that could provide answers.  

The bottom line question will be "Is our SMTP being throttled, and if 
so, how can we end that?"

But first let me tell you about what we are doing.  Darwin Day 
Celebration is a nonprofit corporation (501(c)3 status applied for in 
2004 and expected this year) that is doing science education about 
evolution and Charles Darwin.  We are encouraging and publicizing 
educational celebrations close to February 12, which is Charles Darwin's 
birthday and which our friends call "Darwin Day".  We are working toward 
a worldwide celebration of Science and Humanity, on Darwin's birthday in 
2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth.  We have been doing this at 
the Web site http://DarwinDay.org since the year 2000. Last summer we 
moved that most public site to HostRocket for web hosting, due to their 
available software and human support.  The Darwin Day effort has 
thousands of  people who have been involved, holding events at locations 
around the world.  Browse http://darwinday.org/home/2004.html to see the 
events registered last year or http://darwinday.org/dispevent/index.php 
for the events registered so far this year.

For availability and financial reasons, we have our current DSL line 
through SBC Global, though we thought that this DSL line was just 
providing a neutral connection to the Internet.  We had been using the 
SBC DSL line with the settings for Earthlink, which is the Web hosting 
organization to our corporate site DarwinDayCelebration.org from which 
we send most of our emails.  We presumed that since SBC knew that the 
DSL wire came from our office, we were authenticated.  In any case, 
doing SMTP through the SBC DSL line with Eathlink settings worked fine.  
Recently we were told by Earthlink, that we should change our SMTP mail 
server to correspond to the ownership of the DSL line.  So we switched 
the SMTP setting to smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com and offered authentication 
by using [email-masked] and its password.  Immediately we saw 
the problem of multiple requests for the password.  We were told by your 
support people that there was no problem from our use of the account 
[email-masked] as the Sender on our emails.  Dr.  
Robert Stephens, a former scientist, businessman, city councilman and 
mayor of Menlo Park, California, is the primary founder of Darwin Day 
Celebration, Inc. and is the signatory on most of our emails.

We are sending to science educators, liberal religious groups, and 
religious nonbelievers, whom we feel have a natural interest in 
evolution and the cultural significance of Darwin's publications.  We 
have been building credibility for the Darwin Day idea for nearly 5 
years online, and we are so well respected and pointed to that, if you 
do a Google search for the broad term "Darwin", we appear midway on the 
second page of the Google search results.

We do not believe that our messages would be called spam by reasonable 
definitions.  Our emails are clear honest messages in plain text, 
describing our effort and inviting the recipients to visit our 
DarwinDay.org web site. We customize our messages to the interests and 
beliefs of subgroups of our people.  On the Bayesian spam detection 
systems we score very low on spam characteristics.  We are not a 
commercial operation, nor raising money through the Internet.  We do not 
engage in any deception.  We can send you samples of our messages, if 
you are interested.  On all but the most personal correspondence, we end 
with an offer to unsubscribe any email address that clicks to reply to 
the [email-masked] address, as well as honoring any requests 
sent by other means.  We now have over 49 names in an "unsubscribed" 
database table that we check against before mailing, and we are 
scrupulous about entering any new unsubscribe request.

In the past two months, with February 12 coming, we sent approximately 
8,300 emails to remind and alert people about the Darwin Day effort.   
But since a week ago when we changed our SMTP from Earthlink's settings 
and started using the SBC DSL mail server, we have been having these 
failures of the SMTP protocol.

So, as promised, the bottom line question:   Is our SMTP being 
throttled, and if so, how can we end that?

Sincerely,

David Harris, Database Architect,
and
Robert J. (Bob) Stephens, Ph. D.
Emeritus Director, Cell Biology Program,  SRI International, formerly 
Stanford Research Institute.
Chairman of the Board, Darwin Day Celebration, a Nonprofit Corp.
http://darwinday.org