Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?

Fri Feb 25 16:27:27 UTC 2005

Nils Ketelsen wrote:

>On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 11:36:40PM -0500, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Well, OK.  If you know for a *fact* that your users *never* roam, and you
>>have sufficiently good control of your IP addresses that you can always safely
>>decide if a given connection is "inside" or "outside" and allow them to relay
>>based on that, then no, you don't need to support 587.
>>
>>The rest of us run mail services in the real world, where lots of users buy
>>laptops, and then actually <gasp, shock> *use* the portability and thus often
>>end up behind some other ISP's port-25 block.
>>    
>>
>
>I force anyone, who wants to relay to use SMTP-AUTH on port 25. Only mails
>for local delivery are accepted without AUTH. Whats point
>in opening another port? 
>
>I use this mailserver from a lot of different networks and it works fine.
>If a provider blocks port 25 I call them, ask them to cahnge it, if they
>don't I cancel my contract, because they don't do there Job (forwarding
>IP). 
>
>Nils
>
>
>  
>
Let us know how that goes the next time you are consulting at a 
cable-internet customer site with your laptop......yes you will use ssh.

The priority of a network service provider should be in this order

1) Keep the network up
2) Keep the network un-abusive (this is a long-term extension of 1 
because an internetwork of abusive networks wont last long)
3) Forward customers packets

SO if they block outbound direct-to-mx port 25 spam, I would say they 
are doing their job very nicely indeed.