Earthlink SMTP for Mobile Users

Fri May 10 20:22:04 UTC 2002

I was stuck in a dial-up-only hell for a few months and used quite a
bit of Earthlink dial-up. I during that time, I did a variety of
tinkering of the email headers (like masquerading envelopes). It sure
didn't seem to me that Earthlink cared at all what domain was in the
return path. Their SMTP servers would relay _anything_ provided you're
source IP was in their IP-space.

So, AFAIK, you can do whatever you want with respect to outgoing mail
(any source domain in the envelope or headers that you want) and
Earthlink's SMTP servers will relay it.

Not that I didn't get annoyed with the blocking from time to
time. Sometimes I wanted to talk directly to a remote SMTP server with
telnet to debug a client's setup or see if they were the open relay I
was getting SPAM from. IIRC, you get ICMP admin-prohibited messages
back when you try to connect to port 25. But I probably have to say
that I think Earthlink is doing the right thing, IMHO.

Aren't the other big US dial-up providers doing this kind of thing?
I assumed they all were. Despite the continuous rise in total SPAM
levels, don't see very much SPAM from the US mega-huge dial-ups
anymore.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                     |     cjclark at alum.mit.edu
                                   |     cjclark at jhu.edu
http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/    |     cjc at freebsd.org