Drew, Here's the straight scoop: The "New XO SMTP servers" are new in the sense that they go back to a 1997 platform rather than a 1993 platform that smtp.concentric.net derives from. They're both from the Concentric* part of XO, and both come out of my team, for what it's worth. What we've been doing is consolidating some of the extremely old systems onto the newer platforms, where we've been focusing our development cycles for some time. 'smtp.concentric.net' isn't ceasing to exist, but it's now (or rather, extremely soon) will be on the up-to-date systems. That said, we're not forcing people to host mail with us in order to use us for outbound relay. The one restriction that will be imposed by the new smtp.concentric.net that the old one didn't do was to require the sender domain to exist on-platform rather than to allow completely unchecked relay by domain. Domain hosting is bundled with all our DSL and other network access products, so for the vast majority of people, this is no problem, because we don't need to be authoritative, or have MX pointed to us, for this to work. The one situation where people are impaired is if they want to send mail via a domain name of some other ISP (e.g. aol.com), in which case they should use the relays provided by their other ISP (we don't block outbound port 25 across the board), or if a customer is running a mail server/mailing list/etc of their own, where said server might send out mail from any domain, in which case that server should be doing its own MX routing and not relying on a relay. Most of our DSL and other access customers that use an XO-provided relay are already on the newer platform and have been for a long time, and only a few remain with configurations still pointing at the older legacy systems. So the actual impact here is quite small. You may now all commence flaming this, and me :) --David Schairer VP/Chief Systems Architect XO Communications, Inc. * We have recently relaunched the Concentric brand for our email and hosting products -- www.concentric.com -- for those of you who remember it from the 'before time' :) I have a few discount codes left for email/hosting accounts -- send me an email if interested. On Aug 4, 2004, at 9:41 AM, Drew Weaver wrote:
It has come to my attention that XO has "done away" with some of concentric's email systems and have replaced them with new "XO SMTP servers" these new XO SMTP servers aren't allowing people who don't have their mail hosted at XO to relay mail through them even though they are XO DSL customers, you guys may want to rethink your policy on this. It is generally the responsibility of the ISP to provide the outgoing mail transport for your connected users.
-Drew