...

So the moral is that some big US companies have international IP addresses filtering policies.

Did they tell you why?

No, I would have liked to have found out more from their techos, but I only dealt with their 1st layer support and basically had to have a hissy fit before the problem actually got to their techos. They basically ignored my original email for a week, my second email got the following reply: (The reboot your machine school of support)

The issue with the difficulty of sending e-mail from your New Zealand carrier is evidently associated with your carrier. We do have many clients in New Zealand and we have received no other reports of this type of difficulty. Please contact your e-mail provider regarding this difficulty.

Next reply: (ie: This customer won't go away so we actually have to do something)

I have forwarded all of the information that you have provided to our E-mail systems administrator

Next email: I provide them with the info from you guys about not being able to get to the smtp port (25) from most of NZ etc.. Including a helpful traceroute. Reply:

I have had a supervisor review the information you have sent. He stated the traceroute would fail, since our servers will not allow "pinging" or traceroutes. He also stated that Step 10 could have been different because, although the domains are the same, the query sent to the particular site can take a different route using different "jumps".

I hit the roof and politely read them from the "I'm a customer, your support is s**t" manual. They ask me to send an email to a yahoo address so they can unblock my particular address. I send a detailed email to the address explaining the evils and inappropriateness of wholesale APNIC blocking. They (I believe) give up and stop subnet blocking. Basically getting any info out of them was a nightmare, so I considered myself lucky to get this outcome and left it at that. jfp. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jean-Francois Pirus <jfp(a)clearfield.com> Senior Software Engineer Phone (+64-9) 358 2081 Clearfield Software Ltd Fax (+64-9) 358 2083 4th Floor 8-10 Whitaker Place Mob (+64-21) 640 779 P O Box 2348 Auckland, New Zealand ------------------------------------------------------------------------