Fun new policy at AOL

Thu Aug 28 14:18:45 UTC 2003

> In article <20030828111600.C282.RICHARD at mandarin.com>, Richard Cox
> <Richard at mandarin.com> writes
>> We can thank the usual suspects - Cogent, Qwest, AT&T, Comcast - and 
>> in
>> Europe: BT, NTL and possibly the world-abuse-leader, Deutsche Telekom
>> (who run dtag.de and t-dialin.net) for this being the situation.
>
> Here's another tale of undeliverable email. It seems that [at least] 
> one
> of those organisations you mention assigns IP addresses for its ADSL
> customers from the same blocks as dial-up. Which means that
> organisations using MAPS-DUL reject email from teleworkers (or indeed
> people running businesses with an ADSL connection) who run their own
> SMTP servers.
> -- 
> Roland Perry
>
>

Shouldn't customers that purchase IP services from an ISP use the ISPs 
mail server as a smart host for outbound mail?  We block outbound port 
25 connections on our dialup and DSL pool.  We ask our customers that 
have their own mail servers to configure them to forward through our 
mail servers.  We get SPAM/abuse notifications that way and can kick 
the customer off the network.  We also block inbound port 25 
connections unless they are coming from our mail server and require the 
customer setup their MX record to forward through our mail server.  We 
virus scan all mail coming and going that way.  We protect our 
customers from the network and our network from our customers.  We are 
currently blocking over 3k Sobigs/hour on our mail servers.  I would 
rather have that then all my bandwidth eaten up by Sobig on all of my 
dialup/DSL connections.

SMTP & DNS should be run through the servers provided by the ISP for 
the exact purpose.  There is no valid reason for a dialup customer to 
go direct to root-servers.net and there is no reason why a dialup user 
should be sending mail directly to AOL, or any mail server for that 
matter (besides their host ISP)

-Matt