On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 11:56:51AM -0400, Justin Scott wrote:
As a small player who operates a mail server used by many local businesses, this becomes a support issue for admins in our position. We operate an SMTP server of our own that the employees of these various companies use from work and at home. Everything works great until an ISP decides to block 25 outbound. Now our customer cannot reach our server, so they call us to complain that they can receive but not send e-mail. We, being somewhat intelligent, have a support process in place to walk the customer through the SMTP port change from 25 to one of our two alternate ports.
The problem, however, is that the customer simply cannot understand why their e-mail worked one day and doesn't the next. In their eyes the system used to work, and now it doesn't, so that must mean that we broke it and that we don't know what we're doing.
I feel your pain, local compadre, but I'm on their side. Here's your script: "Allowing unfiltered public access to port 25 is one of the things that increases everyone's spam load, and your ISP is trying to be a Good Neighbor in blocking access to anyone's servers but their own; many ISPs are moving towards this safer configuration. We're a good neighbor, as well, and support Mail Submission Protocol on port 587, and here's how you set it up -- and it will work from pretty much anywhere forever." Which is a safe thing to tell people because it is decidedly *not* best practice to block 587. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Josef Stalin)