SMTP-Friendly ISPs?

alanpage asks: "My ISP got out of the dial-up business and sold my account to Earthlink. They do not allow me to send e-mail (via port 25) on behalf of the web sites that I maintain. Are any of the major players in broadband or dial-up port 25 friendly?"

Comments

Port 25 Friendly?

[bildstorm]

By reading your question, it sounds like you want to send out mail via your ISPs SMTP using an e-mail address for a webdomain not hosted by them. Any GOOD ISP will not let you do this.

You may wonder why. Well, if I can do this, then I can forge e-mail addresses and send out any kind of mail I want. That's a good way to get blacklisted.

Basically "port 25 friendly" is also known as "spam friendly".

What I would recommend is seeing if those sites where those domains are hosted allow SMTP services with password authentication. Some place do, and then you can send out mail from any ISP using those mail server.

My personal e-mail is not connected to my ISP. I have password authentication in place.

Re:Port 25 Friendly?

[jcausey]

That's not what he's asking -- he wants to know about ISPs that don't block an outgoing port 25 connection. That is, the ability to connect to another server on the net via port 25 (SMTP default port). This is a common anti-spam system that the majors (Earthlink, MSN, and I think AOL) use.

FYI for the poster, I think Speakeasy doesn't block outgoing (or incoming) SMTP. They have DSL and dial-up. Personally, I use AOL Timewarner roadrunner, and they don't block it. But cable modems may not be available / desired.

Re:Port 25 Friendly?

[kooshball]

Earthlink, the poster's new ISP (as well as mine), allows this already. My home email system uses Earthlink's SMTP server as a mail gateway. Rather than contacting destination SMTP servers directly, it forwards everything through Earthlink. Since the connection is coming from an Earthlink IP address, the relay is allowed eventhough the address is from a different domain.

Why not use tunnelling

[Molina the Bofh]

Considering you said "on behalf of the web sites that I maintain", I assume you have some degree of control on at least one site outside your ISP.

Why don't you tunnel ? Then you can use whatever port you want.

If you have SSH running on one of these servers - and who doesn't nowadays - you can easily tunnel. Just check your ssh client configurations. If you're running windows, a good client is SecureCRT. If you're running linux, and the other side is windows NT/2000/XP, use this PPtP client

And there's another advantage with tunnelling: You can compress. Unless you have a very fast connection, you'll visibly notice a speed improvement when compressing.

DirectTV DSL

[topside420]

Although not the best DSL provider, they have shapen up in the past few months -- completely revamping all their routers etc, so no its pretty darn reliable. Anyway, DirectTV DSL is giving me great speeds (1.5/256) with good reliability, a static IP, as well as all ports not being firewalled. Only downside is their recent caps of bandwith on USENET groups :(

Use ssh

[Dr. Sp0ng]

If you have a shell account on a box which is outside Earthlink's jurisdiction, you can do what I do:

ssh -L2001:mail.server.to.use:25 my.shell.server

Any connections to port 2001 on your local machine will then be forwarded (encrypted) to your shell server, and from there be forwarded to port 25 on the mail server.

ssh makes a great tool for busting out of firewalls.