At 12:48 PM 9/3/2008, you wrote:
Do you operate your mailserver on a residential cablemodem or adsl
rather than a business account?
No, we co-lo equipment at a professional facility that our customers
on any type of connection need to have access to send mail through,
regardless of whether their ISP blocks the standard ports or not.
-Justin Scott, GravityFree
I've been running a similar operation for over a decade, offering
email services, web services and collocation to businesses from the
tiny to the multinational. We have, since the beginning, provided
instructions on using port 587 and port 465 for email submission.
This is not hard to explain, and it has never been a problem for our
customers or their tech folks to accomplish.
Our servers are in data centers, our customers are on DSL, cable or
even dialup circuits. We assume port 25 will be blocked, and while it
isn't always, starting with that assumption simplifies matters. We
also encourage our customers to always use TLS or SSL for all
exchanges with the mail servers.
Because we have many users who are road warriors, they never know who
their local access ISP will be. Getting them set up for 587 or 465
before they leave home has always kept folks out of trouble. And
those few who don't heed our advice have had their email hijacked by
hotel networks that consume traffic to any remote port 25 themselves
in an attempt to "help." So again, just get your customers configured
right at the start, and there will be few support calls on the subject.
This is just part of being a third-party supplier of email services
in the current reality.
Dan
