North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Lazy network operators

  • From: Daniel Senie
  • Date: Wed Apr 14 11:15:26 2004

At 10:26 AM 4/14/2004, Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote:

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 08:09:39 +0000 (UTC), Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
>>You, sure, how about the people who are not really computer literate and
>>use SMTP AUTH to send their mail from various places? Remember that
>>convinience almost always outweighs security with the general
>>population. If it wouldn�t, the ICT market would not look like it looks
>>today.
>
>That was solved 6 years ago. You let them use port 587 instead of 25.
>http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2476.html

Another datapoint.

That may have been "solved 6 years ago" in theory, but in practice it
is not and that needs to be addressed before one can point the unwashed
masses to this option.   I am rumoured to be literate computer user and
after many months of trying I cannot  find a combination of providers
and software which will accomplish this for me.  I travel a lot and need
this service.
We've been offering service using Submission for many years. We support on our servers, and our clients use any of several mail programs to interact successfully with it including Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.

No, none of the programs is yet smart enough to try port 587 on its own prior to using port 25. Nonetheless, it is not hard to select port 587 in the configuration.

We are far from the only provider supporting RFC 2476.

Because we are a (email/web) hosting provider, and don't offer local access, none of our customers are given access to our mail servers based on their IP address. The only access we allow is authenticated access.