[78214] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Frank Louwers)
Fri Feb 25 05:37:16 2005
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:35:33 +0100
From: Frank Louwers <frank@openminds.be>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <1109316601.11947.7.camel@blue>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 02:30:01AM -0500, Jim Popovitch wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 23:36 -0500, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> >
> > The rest of us run mail services in the real world, where lots of users buy
> > laptops, and then actually <gasp, shock> *use* the portability and thus often
> > end up behind some other ISP's port-25 block.
>
> Why not a VPN solution. If you have mail servers that your users need,
> chances are that you also have file servers, internal web servers.
> calender servers, etc. Should file/web/calender servers all open one
> port or internal access and a second port for authenticated external
> access?
That might work for corporate networks, but not for hosting providers,
isps, etc.
We have about 10000 domains we manage, a lot of them have active mail
users. Imagine a (low) average of 5 mailboxes per domain. That would
mean my team would have to support 50000 VPN connections? No thank you!
Furthermore, to setup a vpn, you need extra software, there are the
issues when you are behind a NAT (or even double-NAT) etc. Almost all
MUA's support auth-smtp on port 587, and thus this can be used from
anywere (cyber-cafe when you are on holiday, pda's, even some
cellphones, ...).
BTW: Belgium's two biggest isps _do_ block tcp/25 outgoing...
Kind Regards,
Frank Louwers
--
Openminds bvba www.openminds.be
Tweebruggenstraat 16 - 9000 Gent - Belgium
