Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?

Wed Feb 16 02:39:31 UTC 2005

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 09:30:18PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> In theory true, you could run a TELNET listener on Port 25 or 135.  But
> the world works a bit better when most people follow the same practice.
> Port 587 is for authenticated mail message submission.

I'm sorry, your last message seemed to indicate that you felt that
Sendmail accepting unauthenticated mail on port 587 (if configured to
accept unauthenticated mail at all) was not a problem; that, somehow,
it was a *good* thing that it would happily apply the same policy to
all ports it listened on, so long as one of those ports was 587.

Is that not, in fact, your position?

It is really hard for me to see encouraging people to run additional
unauthenticated mail servers on some other port as a good idea, and it
is really hard for me to read the actual text in your first message
any other way than simply "mail accepted on port 587 good".

Thor