[78191] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew2@one.net)
Thu Feb 24 16:53:04 2005
From: <andrew2@one.net>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:51:50 -0500
In-Reply-To: <200502242120.j1OLKXuR012631@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
owner-nanog@merit.edu wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:08:42 EST, Nils Ketelsen said:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 09:00:11PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
>>> What can be done to encourage universities and other mail providers
>>> with large roaming user populations to support RFC2476/Port 587?
>>
>> Give a good reason. That is still the missing part.
>
> If you're a roaming user from that provider, and you're at
> some other site that blocks or hijacks port 25, you can still send
> mail by tossing it to your main provider's 587. If that's not a
> good enough reason to motivate the provider to support it, nothing
> will (except maybe when the users show up en masse with pitchforks
> and other implements of destruction...)
There seem to be many who feel there is no overwhelming reason to
support 587. I can certainly see that point of view, but I guess my
question is what reasons do those of you with that viewpoint have *not*
to implement it? I just don't see the harm in either configuring your
MTA to listen on an extra port, or just forward port 587 to 25 at the
network level. Other than a few man-hours for implementation what are
the added costs/risks that make you so reluctant? What am I missing?
Andrew
