Erm, I'd tell my cable provider precisely where to stick it they did that and
yeah, I wouldn't complain too much, I'd just switch to someone else. Yeah, I
have a cable connection with blueyonder, but I never use the email address of
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and I'd be daft to do so - I have a
domain of my own (or I use some 3rd party generic mail) and I send all my
email via SMTP to the mail server provided by my hosting company - and I
think you'll find plenty of other people do this too.
How does your hosting company limits the connections to its SMTP server? I guess you have a dynamic IP, so it would be hard to limit connections to your IP address. If they open access to all of your IP subnet (dynamic IP address pool), then any bad guy on your subnet will be able to use this server as an open relay. From what I understand about your situations, I'd guess that the best thing you should do is to use SASL on your hosting company's SMTP server, and SASL can work on port 587. There is a good chance that port 587 will never be blocked by your ISP.
Now, asking at signup time if you'd like this protection, with the option to
say "no leave me alone" or "help me stay clean, block these ports except to
these addresses" I don't object to, but please don't suggest that home users
aren't allowed basic connectivity - if I wanted to be treated like a child
I'd go back to school.
An arrogant ISP could argue that home users do not have these rights. Home users pay a smaller fee and have restricted connectivity. Power users would have work by these rules, pay more for commercial access or switch ISP. I don't totally agree with this behavior, but it's the world we're living in. For example, my ISP blocks port 25 inbound and outbound, I worked around this by having an external SMTP server relay my mail to my home computer on port 2525. For outbound SMTP traffic, I configured my home SMTP server to relay throught my ISP's SMTP server.
Have a good week-end, GFK's -- Guillaume Filion, ing. jr Logidac Tech., Beaumont, Qu�bec, Canada - http://logidac.com/ PGP Key and more: http://guillaume.filion.org/
