I wrote a small port redirection program that runs on the mail server. It listens on a specific port number, and when it receives a connection, opens a connection on the mail server on port 25, and acts as an "intermediary" between the two. Our customers reconfigure their clients to connect on this port number other than 25, it skips around the various ISP's port 25 blocking, they get to use our SMTP server, and noone is the wiser.
At 12:21 AM 12/13/2003, Matthew Bramble wrote:
Dave Doherty wrote:
Matt, I went through a lot of the same arguments with my StarPowerI think you are assuming too much about your customers being happy under those arrangements. Maybe your outbound SMTP server is problem free, but the ISP's that are implementing such things are far from problem free in my experience, and I hate getting calls about why someone's E-mail isn't reaching it's destination when we aren't handling their outbound traffic. We also provide virus scanning on outbound traffic, which such a configuration defeats.
customers. Once they understand that security and spam control requires that
they use StarPower's SMTP service, they are very cooperative and happy to
make the adjustments. We are fanatical about customer service, and I will
have a tech talk a customer through the email setup, even if it takes an
hour.
I see this approach in the same light as closing down the highways because people speed. It punishes customers and providers that play by the rules, whereas only a small number are sending spam or have computers that are compromised to do so. Because I need direct access to my SMTP server for monitoring, I absolutely have to have a provider that allows SMTP traffic through. If the majority of ISP's played by the rules that you do, SMTP would be broken for all practical purposes as far as I'm concerned.
If you ask around, most here don't consider blocking on DUL lists to be a wise thing to do, though using that in a weighting scheme is a decent idea. It's pretty clear that even Scott is being blocked by Road Runner's servers because of a poor implementation of a DUL list that includes his IP space even though it is static and business-class.
Blocking outbound SMTP is even worse than blocking by DUL. I'm sure that many around here have had similar issues with large ISP's that improperly have tagged their IP space as being dynamic.
I know that this practice negatively affects my business, and it's quite difficult to explain to a non-technical customer why this is, and never once has one of them been happy that their ISP has chosen to do so.
Maybe you aren't aware of this affecting your business, but I, along with several of my LAN integrator friends, would absolutely not recommend an ISP that blocks outbound SMTP traffic because of the problems that it causes me, and the perception that such an implementation is a lazy way of fighting spam. And as far as my experience goes, none of the ISP's doing this that I have encountered went about this in a fully responsible manner. They all chose to make a change and then have me take the calls and do the diagnosis and call them for verification instead of alerting their customers as to the issues.
This also starts encroaching into the areas of censorship and policing ones customers. Once you start getting involved with disallowing SMTP, you remove legitimate objections to blocking file sharing networks, and could even make yourself liable for such things. The industry has taken a very purposeful approach to this by usurping as much responsibility as possible. They don't want to become the Internet's police force, and costly defenses of John Doe's by places like Yahoo and Verizon were not intended to protect criminals, but instead to protect their businesses from liability and burden. The RIAA has even gone after universities for file sharing, and this implicates the universities as being liable for the actions of their students. If you know anything about public colleges, then you should know that they generally have a huge aversion to any form of blocking because of the implications. After one student at my old school got arrested for child porn, a friend of mine who was the sys admin, removed all such groups from their news server, figuring that it wouldn't make for good publicity if they found the guy got it off of their own servers...well, when the guy's boss got wind of this, he forced him to add all of the groups back in. The view here is that it was a can of worms that they wanted nothing to do with as a proactive measure, and their job was not to enforce either moral standards nor the law itself.
Spam is of course a serious problem, and one of the problems is that it causes ISP's to limit access to my servers by my own clients. I assure you that I am not the only one that feels this way, and it does affect your business, though maybe not measureably...it certainly affects mine and I'm not the one blocking this stuff.
Matt
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