What he said.
Look at the situation from their perspective, this is the literally cheapest way to solve a problem and this will only affect a small minority of their customers. While this annoys me I understand it, though it would be nice to request that the block be removed without having to pay a 'business- class' premium.
The general rule of thumb is to always use the DNS and SMTP relay of your immediate upstream provider anyways. If it is a privacy issue then there are easy ways (for the technically savvy) around it (ie. -L25:127.0.0.1:25).
Was there any notification of the change? I don't see my bill anymore and have never used their mail system so I can't assume they just didn't go all commando. If there was no notification then I'm very sad and wonder why they have such terrible administration policies.
On 23-May-07, at 7:14 AM, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:
While I agree it is inconvenient, I would have to disagree that it is nonsense or 'net bigotry'. After watching my mail server logs, I honestly have to say that I wish _All_ ISP's did this to some extent. The fact that probably 50% (if not more) of the spam hitting my mail servers comes from consumer DSL/Cable lines is reason enough to block it IMHO.
Being both a SysAdmin and operating a hosting company, it is a pain for me to explain to clients how to send mail with Shaw or MTS's (or SBC or whichever ISP they are with) SMTP server and receive mail with my POP/IMAP servers, I still think it's for the better.
And I am with Shaw, but I have been using an SSH tunnel to check my mail for a few years now, so it's no big deal to me.