nanog mailing list archives

Re: Is your ISP blocking outgoing port 25?


From: Steven King <sking () kingrst com>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:35:00 -0400

Most MTAs don't come preconfigured with port 587 either. It is amazing
how many people/organizations go with the "if it isn't broke, don't fix
it" mentality, even though it clearly needs to be revised and something
new needs to be done/supported. Email needs to be revamped on a larger
scale than just adding standards.

Sean Donelan wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jun 2009, Jeroen Wunnink wrote:
1. Customers remember it more easily
2. Some ISP's also block 587 (hence 'SMTP ports' rather then 'SMTP
port' in my previous comment ;-)

Those same clueless ISPs will probably block 2525 someday too,
clueless expands to fill any void.  And using non-standard things like
2525 only lead to more confusion for customers later when they try
someone else's non-standard choice, e.g. port 26 or 24 or 5252 and
wonder why those don't work.

On the other hand, why don't modern mail user agents and mail transfer
agents come configured to use MSA port 587 by default for message
submission instead of making customers remember anything? RFC 2476 was
published over a decade ago, software developers should have caught up
to it by now.  Imagine if the little box in Outlook and Exchange had
the MSA port already filled in, and you only needed to change it for
legacy things.


-- 
Steve King

Network Engineer - Liquid Web, Inc.
Cisco Certified Network Associate
CompTIA Linux+ Certified Professional
CompTIA A+ Certified Professional



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