On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
A point that Dean makes here is pretty valid. Last year MHSC tried to run a third-party secure email service, using sendmail. The only way to do that is to allow relaying. The nimrods, that are about closing down all mail relays, absolutely ignore valid business uses for the relays. They don't understand that someone might want to use a different SMTP server, than the one their ISP uses, in order to send to someone in the WEB, FTN, VPN, or PER TLDs. That sort of gateway MUST allow relays in order to function.
The key problem we've run into is that while customers may have a domain hosted with us, they're dialling up to a third party ISP. Normally we'd tell them 'set your email program up to send mail as you@your.domain', but some ISPs (most notably the free ones) seem to only permit mail to go out through their relays if the mail comes from username@their.isp. Of course, we simply tell them to sign up to an ISP that doesn't restrict them in every possible way, but there are a few who are rather anti-this (most notably those on AOL). I'd love to be able to run open relays for these users, to let them send mail out with their own domain on the From: header. The net's not the same place it was even 5 years ago, though, and we just can't leave ourselves vulnerable like that. Ain't progress marvellous? -- Patrick Evans - Sysadmin, bran addict and couch potato pre at pre dot org www.pre.org/pre