At 10:26 AM 4/14/2004, Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote:
On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 08:09:39 +0000 (UTC), Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
You, sure, how about the people who are not really computer literate and use SMTP AUTH to send their mail from various places? Remember that convinience almost always outweighs security with the general population. If it wouldn´t, the ICT market would not look like it looks today.
That was solved 6 years ago. You let them use port 587 instead of 25. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2476.html
Another datapoint.
That may have been "solved 6 years ago" in theory, but in practice it is not and that needs to be addressed before one can point the unwashed masses to this option. I am rumoured to be literate computer user and after many months of trying I cannot find a combination of providers and software which will accomplish this for me. I travel a lot and need this service.
We've been offering service using Submission for many years. We support on our servers, and our clients use any of several mail programs to interact successfully with it including Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. No, none of the programs is yet smart enough to try port 587 on its own prior to using port 25. Nonetheless, it is not hard to select port 587 in the configuration. We are far from the only provider supporting RFC 2476. Because we are a (email/web) hosting provider, and don't offer local access, none of our customers are given access to our mail servers based on their IP address. The only access we allow is authenticated access.