Phorm and Cookies

[Chris Edwards]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, Roland Perry wrote:

| That's only because Outlook (in common with most other such applications) is
| designed that way - which means that you send just one communication to the
| ISP's server, which does all the exploding into multiple destinations, MX
| record looking up for you, the queuing/retrying when the destination is
| unreachable, returning bounce messages and so on [all of which is quite handy
| if you are on an occasionally connected, or bandwidth restricted, connection].
| But the port number's the same.

The port number for client submission was the same, at least in the 1990s.  
Now it's changing (normally to 587), with authentication + hopefully TLS.  
This facilitates separation of client submission traffic from MTA->MTA traffic.

This isn't particularly new, but is most recently documented in RFC 5068.

Folk still submitting on port 25 will be at the mercy of port 25 blocks 
and/or transparent proxies on port 25, the latter breaking SSL (ha - a 
crypto point;-).


| ISPs are doing this as an anti-Spam measure I suppose. Life gets more 
| difficult all the time.

Not necessarily.  From the users' point of view I'd suggest things are 
getter better!  Previously many folk had to reconfigure their outlook 
settings according to where they plug in.  Now, the same settings work 
reliably and securely from anywhere.

(OK, you could always work from anywhere via webmail or VPN.  Now you can 
simply with outlook).