Technical notes about A/I mailboxes

On the user's side, A/I's mail system is totally decentralised: if you want to read and send your e-mail, you can connect to any server of the network. That's the function of our special addresses mail.autistici.org e smtp.autistici.org, which "sort" connections among the servers more or less at random

According to the R* Plan, at any given moment your mailbox is materially located on one server of the A/I network.
That's why your mailbox can happen to be unaccessible due to a temporary connection problem; when this happens, your incoming mail won't get lost, but will stay queued in the other network servers. If the problem is not transitory, your mail account will be moved to a different server and you will be able to read your new mail very soon (to access your archives you'll have to wait for the affected server to be restored).

Connection parametres

You should have received the necessary parametres to connect to your mail server through the mail you received when your account was activated. However, you can find them here.

Sending mail

We have lately been informed about some problems with messages sent through several ISPs (Telecom Italia, for instance). This is mostly because more and more providers are choosing to block private outgoing connections passing through port 25, in an awkward attempt to reduce spam sending.

We would like to remind you that, whenever possible, the recommended ports for mail sending are:

• 465, with SSL
• 587, with TLS

Anti-spam filters

Autistici/Inventati implements on its servers some mechanisms sorted out in order to reduce incoming spam. Since we cannot possibly configure these filters for each single user, they are generally very conservative (i.e. they allow the passage of as many messages as possible). However, messages for which the anti-spam system cannot take a decision are always forwarded to users, with the tag ***SPAM*** in the subject.

Due to some of our anti-spam systems, some messages may be delivered with a minutes delay (but remember that with e-mail instant delivering is never granted: you'd better think about this before worrying about a possible disfunction in A/I's mail services)...