2

Just recently I dove into the VideoLAN open source project. This was my first time using git, and when sending in my first patch (using git send-email --to vlc-devel@videolan.org patches), I was sent the following message from my computer's local mail in the terminal (I'm on OSX 10.6 by the way):

Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. We generally do not accept email from dynamic IP's as they are not typically used to deliver unauthenticated SMTP e-mail to an Internet mail server. http:/www.spamhaus.org maintains lists of dynamic and residential IP addresses. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support

They must think I'm a spammer. I have a dynamic IP and my ISP (Charter) won't let me get a static one, so I tried editing git preferences: git config --global user.email "me@example.com" to my gmail account. However I got the exact same message again.

My guess is that it has something to do with the native mail's preferences, but I have no idea how to access them or modify them. Anybody have any ideas for solving this? Thanks!

SteveStifler
  • 154
  • 1
  • 8

2 Answers2

2

It sounds like your mail client is set up to connect directly to the recipient's email server. As you're seeing, many email service providers refuse to accept incoming mail from dynamically allocated IP space. The way to fix this is to set your email client to use your ISP's outgoing SMTP server. They (Charter) should have a tech support page explaining what hostname or IP address (and possibly which port number) to use. If you're lucky, they might even describe how to configure your email client with the necessary settings. (I don't have a Mac in front of me at the moment to help you with that...)

Charter's outgoing SMTP server will certainly be in statically allocated IP address space, so once you get that set up, you should have an easier time getting your email accepted by the major email providers.

Jim Lewis
  • 43,505
  • 7
  • 82
  • 96
0

It means that your machine isn't considered to be a "legit" mail server (personal PCs generally aren't - especially those on dynamic IP ranges). The account you set the "From:" to doesn't matter; the server is rejecting your computer trying to talk to them directly. Instead what you could do would be to change the --to field to a local address (yourusername@localhost, for example), and then grab the email from your local inbox and resend it using an IMAP client connected to your Gmail client or some such (see here for more info).

Amber
  • 507,862
  • 82
  • 626
  • 550
  • I'm pretty sure you don't want to paste into gmail - that'll destroy a lot of formatting, and invalidate patches. It is, however, possible to use imap-send to dump the patches into your drafts folder then use an imap client (not gmail, it'll still mangle them) to send them. There's a gmail section in the "Submitting Patches" documentation describing how to do this: http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;h=abc65de9464144a7bac38756c01ab315ab6922eb;hb=HEAD – Cascabel Apr 18 '10 at 06:21
  • Thanks for the link Jef, I'll update the answer to suggest that instead. – Amber Apr 18 '10 at 06:25