The Vinters.Net 'outhouse' is a custom made spam management system, operated solely on and by Vintners.Net.

You are probably reading this page as you have had email 'bounced' by the Vintners.Net Outhouse. This page will help you to understand how the Vintners.Net "milter" (mail filter) works, thus helping you to get your legitimate email through it.

When spam is received by any Vintners.Net customer, the Outhouse includes a mechanism for them to mark it as spam; the entire email is preserved and is thence refered to as an "Outhouse Evidence entry".

• URLs:
  If an Evidence entry contains any URLs, those URLs will be added to the milter database. In the future, any email that contains any of those URLs will be rejected.
  Error msg: Rejected, spamvertised website; auto-remove: http://vintners.net/outhouse/?addr=<url>
  By going to the provided link to the Outhouse, you will be presented with a webpage that includes a button allowing you to request removal of the offending URL from the blocklist database.
• Special keywords:
  There are several special keywords that are simply banned. Some obvious typical examples are: "viagra", and "penis". However, you can use these words verbatim -- they only trigger rejection if they are "disguised", namely by replacing the "i" (I) with a "1" (one) or "l" (L), and/or by inserting up to a few characters between the letters of the word.
  Error msg: Rejected, spam keyword pattern; removal not possible: http://vintners.net/outhouse/rejected.html
• "signature" indicators:
  There are a few magic indicators that we at Vintners.net have come to recognize as a "signature" (or perhaps more accurately "watermark") of particular spammers. For obvious reasons, we will not disclose these publicly -- email me if interested. Just as an example, lots of spam contains a particular pair of words where an IP address would be expected in a Received: header.
  Error msg: Rejected, recognized spammer; removal not possible: http://vintners.net/outhouse/rejected.html
  
• "guess" indicators:
  There are a few best guess indicators that we at Vintners.net have come to recognize as indicators that this is spam -- typically format-related. These are the most likely to mistakenly catch an innocent bystander. A likely example would be a subject line that contains a bunch of left justified text, then a bunch of ridiculous whitespace, followed by some more text. Humans would have no reason to include a bunch of junk way off to the right of the subject line, whereas spammers do this to "invisibly" fool older spam detectors.
  Error msg: Rejected, excessive whitespace in Subject, tidy up your msg and resend; http://vintners.net/outhouse/rejected.html
  Another example would be HTML-only email. This is the usual MO for spammers. If a human is caught by this, merely changing your mailer settings to send in plain-text, or in plain-text and HTML will circumvent the test allowing your mail through.
  Error Msg: Rejected, HTML-only mail not accepted, resend as mixed HTML/plain text; http://vintners.net/outhouse/rejected.html
  And another would be base64 encoded email. There is no reason for normal email to be encoded -- the base64 mechanism was intended for sending binary data. Unfortunatley, modern email readers are smart enough to decode the email, then render it. Some spammers take advantage of this fact to get past mail filters, as it may be prohibitive to decode email before spam-checking it. Vintners.Net freely admits to taking the easy way out, by merely refusing such email.
  Error Msg: Rejected, encoded mail not accepted, resend as mixed HTML/plain text; http://vintners.net/outhouse/rejected.html