[Getting dangerously off-topic here, sorry if it offends anyone] On Friday 26 March 2004 19:24, Bryan Scott wrote: > This isn't about protecting users (per se). It's about keeping the ISP > networks out of the blacklists and reducing network saturation from > "illegal" proxy traffic.
That, IMHO, is where the ISPs fail, they seem to forget who's paying for the service, and when you start cutting features for the provider's benefit alone, the customers think they're being ripped off and go elsewhere - you just have to sell the restriction as benefits to the user. > The change wouldn't prohibit customers from being able to send email. If > they choose to not use our outbound SMTP server (which provides relay for > on-net customers, regardless of their domain name), they simply register a > request to leave port 25 outbound open for them (inbound wouldn't be > touched). It does what ?? So any customer can connect to your mail server and send mail as anyone - I think I can guess the reasons why you've done that, but it looks precisely the wrong way round to me. So I guess you'll say you've got a log if anyone complains - but the fact is you're actively making a decision to participate in potential fraud - I'd get a very good lawyer to check your liability (in every country, not just the USA) if I were you. If we ran our mail server inside our company like that I know our lawyers would have our bollocks on toast... > After thinking about it for a while, I don't see why it would be too much > of a problem, as most dialup providers already block outbound SMTP except > to their mail servers. Unfortunately for dialup accounts, you don't have > the optionto use a different mail server except on a different port (which > works really well for our customers' mobile users). Really ? Before my broadband I used 5 different free (UK) dialup accounts on a round-robin basis and never used any of their SMTP servers but always sent stuff via my hosted domain... now I wouldn't claim that my 5 providers extrapolate to "most", but as it was just 5 picked pretty much at random then I'd express at least some doubt about your logic. Cheers -- Tim
