spit, cuss, dirt, sbc, spam, port 25 blockage, crap, dang....

[bs_texas]

[big rant]
I have 3 different ISPs that I have email accounts with. For the last 6 months I have been able to send and receive email from all three using their individual pop and smtp server settings.
Since last weekend I can no longer send email from my work account or my earthlink account from home through my sbc yahoo dsl system.

sbc has blocked the use of any other smtp server through their system.

I was able to change the smtp server on my earthlink account to mail.swbell.net and then was able to send mail from that earthlink account. But, on my work laptop, I need to leave the smtp server set they way it is for when I'm at the office. The net effect is that I can no longer send work email when I work at home. (I'm going to try to use mail.swbell.net as my smtp server at the office, but I don't think that's going to work there since that ISP is not sbc or swbell and I won't be connected through sbc yahoo dsl. Unless your email doesn't care where you do your smtp.)

Dang stupid moron boneheaded spammers!!

:mad:

[/big rant]

[Parcival]

I'm not sure if I understood your problem correctly, but in Thunderbird you can easily manage various entries of smtp servers and set the one as default with the click of a mouse depending on your location.

[mrBen]

Yeah - most ISPs have taken to doing this now. It's very inconvient if you do have people who work from two locations, and even more so if they are not technically adept.

:(

I feel your pain.

[tucolino]

pay yahoo 20$ a year. get a 2 gigabyte account and you can smtp from anywhere. other solutions may be to buy your domain and pay for hosting, which would allow you to have your own smtp server. if you wanna dig a bit more, you can just pay just for your own domain, and do all the hosting, smtp server, etc on your own server yourself...

tuco

[Daedrus]

Don't know if this will work with SBC or not, but just set your outgoing smtp server on your accounts to point to the sbc smtp server. I have to point to the local smtp server at work because the corp firewall block smtp traffic to outside smtp servers.

[bs_texas]

I see MrBen understands the problem.

(Oh, and there's no real 'solution'. SBC has simply blocked other smtp servers from being used while connected through their system. Some sort of port 25 blockage.)

I tested using mail.swbell.net as my smtp server on this laptop when I'm at work, but of course it doesn't work since there I am connected to the internet via a T1 connected through a different ISP.

But, it will work from this laptop for my work email if I change the smtp server to mail.swbell.net while at home connected through sbc yahoo dsl.

So, for those days when I work from home I will have to go into the settings and change the smtp server to swbell if I want to send work email out.

Sorry, this is just kind of a long winded rant about something that worked one day (and for the 6 months I've been at that location) and then stopped working the next day and no notification was given from sbc and I spent 3 days trying to figure out why I could no longer send email through my work smtp or my earthlink smtp.

[ph34r]

You could always tunnel a ssh connection to use your localhost as your mail server, forwarding that port to a real mailserver, assuming you have shell access to the mail server (or some machine on the same network).

[tucolino]

wait... i think what you are saying is that you can use the smtp servers only when you are using their respective isp. is that correct? basically your isp's don't allow relaying. you basically need an smtp with authentication or relaying allowed. the yahoo option i mentioned earlier allows you to use their smtp server from any isp. does cost 20 bucks a year though.

tuco

[bwkaz]

If I understand the problem correctly, it has nothing to do with them blocking relaying.

The problem is actually that they REQUIRE relaying when you're connected to their network -- that is, they block outgoing port-25 connections except to their SMTP server. (If you connect to their SMTP server from inside their network, they will allow relaying. I assume their server is set up to reject relaying in other cases, though.)

The reason is that there are a lot of Windows users in the world, they use an operating system with the bulletproof-ness (which isn't a word, I know ;)) of Swiss cheese, and they routinely get infected with mass mailing worms, Trojan horses, and viruses (and most of the time, they don't even have a clue it's happened). Some of these worms, Trojan horses, and viruses send out a lot of spam, but they don't do it by talking to SBC's SMTP server. They connect directly to the SMTP server of the user that they're sending the spam to.

This is the type of connection that SBC has blocked.

bs_2003 requires this behavior to work, though I'm not entirely sure that I understand why.

Blame it all on the shoddy, overpriced, vulnerable CRAP that most people use. And then don't bother even TRYING to secure. :(

[bs_texas]

Originally posted by bwkaz
bs_2003 requires this behavior to work, though I'm not entirely sure that I understand why.


Your explanation is probably closer to the dilemma than I can describe.

And, the behavior... just because it worked before and then it didn't. The main problem is with my laptop, which is my work computer, and it has W2K and Outlook 2K on it. At the office we use an ISP and we have their pop and smtp server info setup in Outlook. When I bring the laptop home every night, I can no longer use outlook on the laptop, to do work related email communications, unless I now change the smtp server setting in outlook to an smtp server that sbc likes.

I can connect to my work system via a VPN, so I might check into connecting that way to be able to do email sending. (I don't normally connect through the VPN unless something comes up and I have to get at one of the servers.)

Again, it just goes back to what i said, it's just a matter of "now you see it, now you don't". It worked one way one day and then it didn't the next.

This thread could probably be closed now.
Blame it all on the shoddy, overpriced, vulnerable CRAP that most people use. And then don't bother even TRYING to secure.
Exactly...
Edit: But more importantly, blame it on the boneheads that take advantage of that.

Edit2: Also note that I posted this thread, along with the informative title ;) , just after having 2 online tech support chat sessions with earthlink and sbc.