[78244] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric A. Hall)
Fri Feb 25 12:17:04 2005
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:08:45 -0500
From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>
To: andrew2@one.net
Cc: 'Nils Ketelsen' <nils.ketelsen@kuehne-nagel.com>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20050225161918.7656619DE@testbed9.merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 2/25/2005 11:17 AM, andrew2@one.net wrote:
> department. I'll agree with you on one thing, though -- the whole
> business of port 587 is a bit silly overall...why can't the same
> authentication schemes being bandied about for 587 be applied to 25,
> thus negating the need for another port just for mail injection?
It's not just authentication. Mail from local users might need some fix-up
work done to it, like adding Date or Message-ID, or completing a
mail-domain in an address, or doing some other kind of cleanup. You don't
necesarily want to do that for server-server messages, since their absence
is good spam-sign, but at the same time you do want to do it for user
mail. You can also conduct different kinds of tests, perform different
kinds of rate-limiting, map in different headers (auth, for example), and
so forth.
Separating your traffic is good management.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
