On 23 May, Sean Walberg wrote:
Mine went out this morning... Thanks for sending the note around, Trevor.
Mine just went too, when I woke up today. And one other customer of mine is hosed too. I still have about 10 other customers who *aren't* blocked. Nice consistency! I've written a little it of code into my service-watcher scripts to check for blocked smtp then auto-notify me via a shawmail-routed email address. I'll watch as they fall one by one.
As for "net bigotry", I'm an administrator of about 20 separate sites run off of do-it-all linux firewall/servers. As an admin, I can unequivocally say that I'd much rather have port 25 open and deal with the spam myself (greylisting, bayes, etc), than have to deal with ISP's mail servers. It's a matter of control. With my own MTA talking direct to the recipient MTA, I know an email got through, at least out of my end of the "cloud". With Shaw/MTS in the way, they can drop whatever email they like without a bounce just because it fits into some program's overaggressive idea of what spam is. In addition, the delays introduced by Shaw/MTS can often be horrible. Lastly, it completely farks up my DK/SPF setup, neither of which handles smarthost forwarding very well.
Of course, I've said this all before, and I know some disagree with me, mostly those who have dedicated/static pipes on the corporate budget.
To me, it's all about freedom: "bit freedom", don't tell me what I can and can't do with my bits. At least I know Stallman would be on my side ;-)