--On Friday, September 2, 2005 12:17 +0100 Adam Funk
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...
Since many of you believe that residential customers should be forced to
route all their mail through their ISPs' smarthosts, I think it follows
that ISPs have a duty to provide reliable outgoing SMTP to their
customers.
Well, hold on a minute. Is that true? Certainly lots of us subscribe to
lists of dial-up and ADSL hosts, and don't accept mail from them. That's
because - according to some reports - some huge proportion of them (25%?)
are spambots.
However, it probably isn't true that anyone is insisting that anyone uses
their ISP's smarthost. For example, here at the University of Sussex, we
provide a smarthost for all of our students and staff. Now, some ISPs won't
let people connect to our smarthost on port 25 - so we provide MSA on port
587. See <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2476.html>. So all our users have at
least two options.
Finally, they can also go elsewhere to find smarthost services. For
example, they could buy a hosted server, or virtual server, or virtual
domain.
So you do have several choices. I don't know whether you were going to rely
in whole or in part on the argument that you had no choice - but you can't
really make that argument. If your ISP starts to intercept or block traffic
on port 587, then you would have a good argument.
My ISP however claims that "The e-mail is a free service provided by us
and therefore no compensation can be offered for downtime of this
service." (It also claims this about everything other than
connectivity: in other words, everything else is a free service, for
which we have no responsibility, which we provide to people who pay for
an internet connection.)
I believe this violates the (UK) Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and am
planning to make a formal complaint to Ofcom about it, so I'd
appreciate any arguments [1], comments and references to support this
case.
--
Thanks,
Adam
[1] "An argument is not just a contradiction!" (quoted from memory:
might not be exactly right)
--
Ian Eiloart
Servers Team
Sussex University ITS
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