T'other day I tried to send an email to someone with a hotmail address. It bounced with a bizarre message from microsoft's server wittering on about policies - basically it didn't trust my outgoing mailserver, because it's a small independant ISP, not one of the biggies like BT, AOL etc.

Then just before, tried to send another email, and got a message back from my own outgoing server saying it was being sick on the from: address (which isn't the same domain as the ISP, but for legitimate reasons).

All of a sudden all the ISP's seem to have suddenly cracked right down on what mail they'll deign to handle, and from what source.. must have been a particularly bad spam storm lately.

Anyone else had any problems receiving / sending mail?

Are we finally heading into a world where Aol users will only be able to email other AOL users, BT customers will only talk to other BT customers,  etc etc? If you've been reading techy websites like the register, it seems to have been on the cards for a while 

Dosent effect me as all my mail is sent and received via aol

that would be so absurd

That's the point Quacks, in such a world I wouldn't be able to communicate with you via email, as your AOL won't recognise my mailserver, because it isn't on it's 'whitelist'.

The ramifications could be, maybe are intended to be, the death of smaller ISP's, further strengthening the AOL - BT - Microsoft email oligopoly.

[tinfoil hat /off & something that may help: http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview]