Unsecured wifi might be contributory negligence

Nicholas Bohm nbohm at ernest.net
Fri Feb 24 14:16:06 GMT 2012


On 24/02/2012 13:51, Roland Perry wrote:
> In article <A4BCAED0-C855-46F8-8BA0-E206E1E95465 at batten.eu.org>, Ian
> Batten <igb at batten.eu.org> writes
>>>> Wireless users can't contact my MTA, and would need to login to my
>>>> ISP's.  No issues.
>>>
>>> Many spammers will have their own MTA (it's faster than using someone
>>> else's anyway), or back in the day use an open relay. I've got an MTA
>>> on my Windows laptop (which is part of my road warrior kit).
>>
>> But a lot of ISPs block port 25 (and sometimes even 587) to and from
>> anything other that their MTAs.  It's a common complaint for customers
>> who want to (for whatever reason) use their own MTA.    I think that,
>> aside from a few hold-outs, that's generally now held to be good
>> practice.
>
> Blocking (or transparent proxying) is very common for Port 25, but
> I've yet to encounter one that blocks Port 587 (not even the various
> Mobile Broadband offerings).
>
> <Straw Poll> I'm posting this from a colleague's BT Broadband, using
> Port 587, to a non-BT MTA, no problems.

My PC crashed (BSOD), I restarted, Thunderbird wouldn't send mail,
checked account settings and it was trying to send using port 587,
changed this to port 25 and it worked fine.  (How the average user is
supposed to cope with this sort of thing I can't imagine.)

Nicholas
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