ARIN whois

Tue Nov 23 11:58:13 UTC 1999

On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:

> A point that Dean makes here is pretty valid. Last year MHSC tried to run a
> third-party secure email service, using sendmail. The only way to do that is
> to allow relaying. The nimrods, that are about closing down all mail relays,
> absolutely ignore valid business uses for the relays. They don't understand
> that someone might want to use a different SMTP server, than the one their
> ISP uses, in order to send to someone in the WEB, FTN, VPN, or PER TLDs.
> That sort of gateway MUST allow relays in order to function.
> 
The key problem we've run into is that while customers may have a
domain hosted with us, they're dialling up to a third party ISP.
Normally we'd tell them 'set your email program up to send mail as
you at your.domain', but some ISPs (most notably the free ones) seem to
only permit mail to go out through their relays if the mail comes from
username at their.isp.

Of course, we simply tell them to sign up to an ISP that doesn't
restrict them in every possible way, but there are a few who are
rather anti-this (most notably those on AOL).

I'd love to be able to run open relays for these users, to let them
send mail out with their own domain on the From: header. The net's not
the same place it was even 5 years ago, though, and we just can't
leave ourselves vulnerable like that.

Ain't progress marvellous?

-- 
Patrick Evans - Sysadmin, bran addict and couch potato
pre at pre dot org                     www.pre.org/pre