News to me folks

I found this article while catching up on my RSS feeds this morning. I too have been slightly miffed at the fact that when I am at work at Goodwill that I can not log on to my SMTP servers at Jesus Connect or Bellsouth to SEND out e-mail but rather have been forced to use gmail which is a web based provider for Google. For those of you that are not bloggers and did not get an invitation to use gmail you are forced to use one of the other many web based email clients. I for one am a fan of Outlook 2003 which is a very nice PIM (personal information manager) which allows me to synchronize my data in Outlook with my Pocket PC. Webmail just will NOT do this. The other thing that literally sucks is that if their server goes down, guess what, you are out of luck. Your email account and all your email is cyber dust until they restore the server. Well, anyway, you get the jist. There are advantages to webmail and disadvantages. That is why I choose to use both. This is an excellent story btw.
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ISPs Blocking Port 25 To Curb Spam Hurts The Honest Guy
Posted by Ed Hansberry @ 03:00 PM


This morning I woke up, logged into my laptop and started taking care of a number of emails in my various accounts. I have one work account and 4 personal accounts. Three of those personal accounts are using other SMTP servers, including my Pocket PC Thoughts account. Do do this, you need access to port 25. Why are ISPs blocking these? Because of ignorant people. They never run Windows Update, they installed a virus scanner in 2001 and haven't run a single update and click on every attachment in their inbox. Their computers are zombies sending out hundreds of millions of emails a day. Comcast admits "We're the biggest spammer on the Internet" because of these users.

Did Bellsouth.net, my ISP, warn me? Did they send out and email telling me port 25 would no longer be available? No! (Please note: the rest of this post can best be appreciated it you print it off and read it while storming around the room, occasionally giving a stilted kick or two at nothing in particular, and, of course, a bit of spittle can't hurt either.) So after about 30 minutes of figuring out why most of my emails weren't sending through various accounts and 3 different email clients, it dawned on me that port 25 was probably blocked. I called their customer service department and after getting bounced around to 4 people, I finally got someone that knew what was going on. "Yup. 25 has been blocked and we aren't unblocking it for anyone. Period."

AAARGGGHHH!!! I've been with them nearly three years and they took away my ability to send emails through my other email servers. I have a laptop and can't reconfigure all of my accounts to send through their servers because when I am on the road or connected through another network, their email server is unavailable to me. They allow no external access to their SMTP server. Idiots. So, the solution to the spam problem cause by a few ignorant people with zombie machines and the occasional intentional spammer is to block everyone?!? What IT genius at Bellsouth.net's made this decision? And who's decision was it to not open that port back up for customers that need it and haven't been accused of spamming?

With this logic, I can also fix the prostitution problem. Let's just block driving up and down the roads ladies of the evening hang out at. Never mind the thousands of drivers that use those same roads daily for legitimate reasons. For those few offenders, we'll inconvenience everyone.

I do have a potential alternative that many don't. I could theoretically always VPN into my corporate LAN and send through there, but there is one small problem, and I am not going to beat around the bush on this. Connection Manager for the Pocket PC sucks! It has been broken since Pocket PC 2002 and is still broken in Pocket PC 2003 SE. You cannot VPN into a LAN and send "internet" traffic through that connection unless you have a Proxy Server installed, so this solution would be for my laptop only and on my wireless LAN, that just isn't good enough.

So now I have an $80/month business account, which does open port 25, instead of a $47/month home account. Totally insane. All because of some knee-jerk reaction to a valid problem solved with wrong-headed thinking, and as far as computing goes, that is the most evil thing that can happen. And in dealing with evil, Jules may said it best: