Re: Lazy network operators

["Robert E. Seastrom" <rs () seastrom com>]

"Christopher L. Morrow" <christopher.morrow () mci com> writes:

> On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Randy Bush wrote:
>
> > > The reality is that the vast majority of email is handed off to
> > > a designated mail relay (whether we're talking about consumer
> > > connections or office environments), and if we actually
> > > configured connectivity in this matter, there wouldn't be a
> > > problem.
> >
> > our innate fear of this stems from suspicion of centralization and
> > the telco switch model.  this fear is not clearly unjustified.
>
> There are also plenty of legitimate reasons to permit
> earthlink/juno/mindspring dialup users to hit mail relays on their own
> domains. For instance, when on travel how does John Curran access his
> istaff.org email? (presuming no 'ssh to my shell server and use
> pine/elm/mh/mailx)

Authenticated-only SMTP on port 587 (or alternately 773 if you like
being different) as per rfc2476 works great here, and we have several
users who dial up from AOL when travelling.  AOL translucently proxies
outbound port 25 stuff in such a way that either smtp-auth or starttls
(forget which, maybe both?) gets broken.

Fixing mail clients to try port 587 *first* in the absence of
configuration that specifically named a port would remove some of the
support overhead for organizations that have to deal with Joe & Jane
Luddite as end-users.  Are you listening, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Apple?

                                        ---Rob