I didn't see anyone address this from the service provider abuse department perspective. I think larger ISP's got sick and tired of dealing with abuse reports or having their IP space blocked because of their own (infected) residential users sending out spam. The solution for them was to block the spam. The cheapest/easiest way to do this was to block TCP 25 between subs and the internet, thus starting a trend. If 587 becomes popular, spammers will move on and the same ISPs that blocked 25 will follow suit. A better solution would have been to prevent infection or remove infected machines from the network(strong abuse policies, monitoring, give out free antivirus software, etc). Unfortunately, several major players (ATT, for example) went down the road of limiting internet access. Now that they've had a taste, some of them feel they can block other ports or applications like p2p (Comcast), Netflix (usage based billing on Bell, ATT, others). Unfortunately, I don't see the trend reversing. I'm afraid that Internet freedoms are likely to continue to decline and an "Unlimited" Internet experience won't exist at the residential level in 5+ years. --Blake