--On Thursday, May 9, 2002 8:26 PM -0600 Joel Baker <lucifer@lightbearer.com> wrote:
Earthlink was doing this for basically all of their consumer-grade (dialup, most of the ADSL, etc) customers in 1999 (well, almost certainly earlier than that, but I can only personally speak to it being in place then). It doesn't stop absolutely everything, but it's a very good 95% first pass filter. Don't forget to allocate support queue time for explaining to folks why they can't do SMTP relaying through their other provider where they have a hosting account, though...
My customers who reach me (a mail service) from Earthlink dialups are affected by this. Apparently it's still happening. I run a listener on another host and port, known only to this (so far) small subset of people, to be able to serve them. In general, we advise people to use their ISP's relay for outgoing mail, but Earthlink won't let them relay because the sender domain is not one that Earthlink knows about (i.e. is charging them for). Apparently. In principle, I endorse this practice. It seems to reduce abuse, which is all to the good. But in practice, it creates a problem I have to solve. Is there a way for these unfortunate people to register other domains with Earthlink as "outbound relay only"?