Radio 4: ISPs moving services overseas

[Adrian Midgley]

From: Roland Perry <roland@linx.net>


>Turnpike will operate with incoming SMTP, one of the main reasons
it's
>so popular with Demon customers. However, that's not the entire
story.
>If you want to have your email delivered "direct to your doormat"
(tm),
>then you'll have to have a permanently connected host without an MX
>record [pointing anywhere else]. Which also means you have to have a
>static IP number. Does NHS Net use these, and how permanently
connected
>are the typical PCs used to receive email?

NHS Net insists on staic IP numbers.  The ISDN lines are centrally
funded, and may as well be regarded as permanent connections.  There
is a way of raising any individual Practice's line from outside it.

VPOP3 is my Windows tool of choice, and handles SMTP both ways, Direct
or Relay.

>To avoid the sender's ISP as well, the sender will have to be able to
>set up his client not to use a Mail Gateway

>Hmm. slightly techie solution here - but Sendmail will compile and
run under
the Cygwin package - so can be run under windows.
You can also configure it to do all sorts of fun things

No need.  I am not the only GP running a Linux box on the practice
network.  Postfix or Exim may be more secure than sendmail?

>But some ISPs (or at least Freeserve) catch outbound mail and force
it
through their mail servers - my sendmail thinks, for example, that
this
message will be delivered direct to chiark.greenend.org.uk; it will be
logged as such, and the outgoing IP connection will be to chiark's IP
address.

However, in the NHS Net, there is only one SMTP server!
Most of the traffic was intended to go through the X.400 chain, at
present I hear that 50% is, which suggests to me that the split will
be around 75% SMTP and 25% X.400
There is a simple refusal to provide mailboxes with POP3 or IMAP4
access inside the laager, thus those who know what they are doing are
collecting their mail from various services outside the NHS perimeter,
and those who do not know what they are doing are using Hotmail.

Our local service went down under the weight of concept virus recently
(it is believed - information is as ever sparse, but certainly there
was a major outage of the pair of mirror and RAIDed MS Exchange
servers that junior techs train on before looking for jobs outside,
intended to serve 75 practices) with apparently resolution by deleting
outstanding mail.

I wouldn't know, since I don't let business mail go through that.  The
SMTP server (running an Open Source SMTP server on a Unix) has been
very reliable.

The whole thing is marginally believable when you look at it.