I cannot agree to the "block port 25" line of action. I am a Unix sysadmin, with 15 years of experience as sendmail and DNS expert. I have a DSL line at home, with static IP, and generic rDNS provided by my ISP. Behind it I have a serious Unix server, configured to roughly the same standard that I use at work. I know enough about this business to not trust my ISP with anything more than moving packets to and from my server (and even that is streching it ;-). I don't want to pay for their lousy mail service, I can do it better myself. And you don't want to let me? Now, *why* should *I* be punished because the rest of my neighbours have chosen to jump into the commercial bed of an operating system that is a walking invitation to cracking? The Internet is designed to be end-to-end. I know of ISPs that try to filter out IP telephony to force the users to use and pay for the ISP's VOIP service. Is that OK? No, I thought not. But remember - when VOIP gets deployed really wide and far (like e-mail today), you'll start to receive a lot more abusive phone calls. Why? This all boils down to cost and cost model. In the real world, the sender pays for the (paper) mail message. In the electronic world, the bigger cost is carried by the recipient. This model will break in the future. It's too d---ned cheap to send out spam, and it'll be too d---ned cheap to sell your stuff over VOIP in the future. We could fight all this, but it takes manpower and competence, and manpower and competence cost real money - money that the customer is not willing to spend ... yet. This is a market problem. It will eventually sort itself out, but stopping serious and sesnsible people from using the Internet as it is designed, is not the right way to do it. If the Internet is going to survive - the cost model has to change. Or, there's another future, where the Internet as we know it, is just a packet transport system, on which we build our own (several) virtual networks which are only reachable by the community (-ies) that we choose. Configuration nightmare. But someone will make money by providing software tools to help us make our worlds as complex as possible (see "NAT" in your dictionary ...) (Hmm. Maybe I should start a BGP feed that blacklists all ISPs that block port 25? Hmm. Hmm. Any takers? :-) Cheers, /Liman #---------------------------------------------------------------------- # There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand # binary numbers, and those who don't. #---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Lars-Johan Liman, M.Sc. ! E-mail: liman@autonomica.se # Senior Systems Specialist ! HTTP : //www.autonomica.se/ # Autonomica AB, Stockholm ! Voice : +46 8 - 615 85 72 #----------------------------------------------------------------------