[78006] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thor Lancelot Simon)
Tue Feb 15 21:38:56 2005
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 02:36:11 +0000
From: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@NetBSD.org>
To: Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20050216022304.GC2918@skywalker.creative.net.au>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 02:23:04AM +0000, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>
> Quite useful when it works (read: the other party has implemented
> AUTH-SMTP on port 587).
And if they's implemented unauthenticated SMTP on port 587, like,
say, Sendmail, you've achieved nothing, or possibly worse, since you
have encouraged people to simply run open relays on a different port
than 25. How long do you think it's going to take for spammers to
take advantage of this? (That's a rhetorical question: I already see
spam engines trying to open port 587 connections in traces).
Slavishly changing ports isn't the solution. Actually using authentication
is the solution. It is silly -- to say the least -- to confuse the benefits
of the two.
Thor
