It would be nice if we could use SMTP-AUTH on port 25, but the spammers ruined that for us around the same time they ruined courtesy relay.
How did they ruin SMTP Auth? Thanks.
They made it impossible to use port 25 at all, since it's impractical for ISPs to sniff outgoing traffic to permit SMTP AUTH connections and block others, and way too much of the other port 25 traffic was direct-from-dialup spam. SMTP AUTH works fine on port 587, since there should be no traffic to that port that isn't authenticated somehow. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner "A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web