Verizon.net Finally Moving Email To Port 587

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @09:06AM from the decade-late-and-a-megabuck-short dept.

The Washington Post's Security Fix blog is reporting that Verizon, long identified as the largest ISP source of spam, is moving to require use of the submission port, 587, in outbound mail — and thus to require authentication. While spammers may still be able to relay spam through zombies in Verizon's network, if the victims let their mail clients remember their authentication credentials, at least the zombies will be easily identifiable. Verizon pledges to clean up their zombie problem quickly. We'll see.

1 of 195 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Do zombies even use ISP mail servers? by stevey · 2009-02-17 09:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

Indeed.
But if you're the ISP you can just say "Hey customers outgoing port 25 is blocked - use authentication and port 587 to send mail".
In general I'm against ISP blocking services, but in the case of spam prevention its a good choice to make.
(The ideal would be to allow outgoing, but cut people off if they spam. That would punish only the guilty, but I guess they're not so keen on that).