>Is this legitimate ? I mean, I am trying to use a mail host for which I
>am fully allowed to (Hell! I am in charge of the other mailers) and am
>being blocked. When my primary internet account was down, I was unable
>to send mail for 3 days !!!
Then you've chosen the wrong ISP as your "backup". Either get a more
reliable primary ISP or find a backup that allows you to use the mail
sending methods you use. As someone else mentioned, it's generally not
hard to get an exception if you really need it (we've done this for
customers on DSL and static dialups).
>To me the blocking of port 25 is more of a CYA for the ISP. Nothing
>more, it benefits no one but the ISP. I can understand why an ISP would
>do it, but there must be better mechanisms for blocking spam ....
Not true. Blocking port 25 benefits the customer as well:
* It makes it far less likely that your dialup pool (or, for that matter,
your whole net block) will end up in a blackhole list somewhere.
* It takes a lot less time and effort to figure out when someone is
spamming and who they are, since everything is occurring on your mail
server.
* It allows the ISP to take a pro-active role in spam prevention. It's
fairly simple to write a shell script that checks the mail queue every
few minutes, or sees how many connections occurred, and send an alert
based on that.
All of these measures benefit the customers as much as the admins, in
terms of the savings in time and resources needed to deal with spam.
Customers and business partners also will look more favorably upon an ISP
that takes an active role in maintenance and spam prevention. I can
speak from experience on this one.
shag
