Re: Selection of Appropriate Local SMTP Relay

["Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc () iMach com>]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Brandon Ross wrote:
> Not quite, this would actually cause more problems for those of us who use
> wholesalers for our dialup services than it would solve.  It's quite
> important to us for many reasons for our customers to use our SMTP
> servers, not our wholesaler's.  If each AS directed all the traffic from
> these well known addresses to their 'best' SMTP server, we wouldn't be
> able to stop our customers from sending spam or control the quality of our
> SMTP services. 

Sorry for the ignorance here...  

When you buy wholesale dialup how does the internet-destined traffic get
routed from your customer to the internet.

If it goes from the dialup through the wholesaler's network to yours and
to the internet, this will not cause breakage (I doubt this is the case).

If it goes from the dialup through the wholesaler's network and directly
to the internet, this WILL cause breakage.

(I can think of some uses for policy routing here, but I doubt that in
most cases they would be useful)

The point of the well-known addresses is to provide a best-guess default
for those services which most likely need to be utilized from the dialup
provider.   For example, a lot of ISP's will not provide POP before SMTP
authorization for relay, instead they rely on whichever ISP is actually
hosting their "roaming" customer for relay.   If ISP's could configure
their customer's computer so that as long as they dial into a RFCXXXX
compliant ISP they will be able to send mail, it would be great.   

I do understand that there is going to be some breakage.  Especially when
your customers don't dial into you.   That's when having them
hard-configure their software for your servers and having them use POP
before SMTP auth makes since.

- Forrest W. Christian (forrestc () imach com) KD7EHZ
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