torel
join:2000-01-27
Morrison, CO | From the DSL company point of view I'm in favor of DSL providers providing SMTP based upon IP address, regardless of ISP or domain and Port blocking is more sensible than domain blocking. Here is how it worked in the DSL world before the crash that took down my company Jato and others:
A company is using email through a dial-up ISP - their own domain or the ISP's. They may have more than one location including home and on the road. They can all use their email because the domain is hosted by their dial-up ISP and whatever rules applied before DSL were familiar and accepted by them.
The DSL company comes along and sells them a DSL line to their office. If their ISP has connections through the DSL company, the IP addresses are recognized and the customers still use mail without changing settings or any other problems. If, as was likely for my DSL company, the ISP didn't have a connection, the customer would have one ISP for their office and one for elsewhere. BIG PROBLEMS and their mail would now not work from the office!!!
The typical local ISP blocks SMTP mail from unknown IP addresses. Almost none use SMTP authentication, since that is more than the ISP's need. Their reaction was uniformly "You are supplying their IP address, you should be supplying their SMTP." That was their way to allow a dial-up customer use whatever account/domain they wanted and send mail through the ISP's mail server.
I agreed with that, but I couldn't pursuade my bosses (who refused to speak to the customers themselves) to open up our mail servers to our IP addresses. The bosses were of the opinion that whoever was supplying email to them should provide their SMTP - if they wanted they could switch over to our email entirely. It makes theoretical sense, but that would entail the customer's ISP changing their anti-SPAM protections, which none would do. Since we outsourced our email for $2/mailbox and provided five for free to customers, we also lost money forcing customers to bring their email to us. It was putting the customer in the middle of a battle between their dial-up ISP and Jato and they were the ones suffering without SMTP service.
It also meant spending hours explaining to customers why their email they had been using so reliably now wouldn't work, switching DNS and customer email settings, including often forcing them to change their email address @theirISP.com since our authentication checked their "From" domain, it killed several deals when we had to charge customers for mailboxes they used to receive for free, and it gave our company a black eye for having promised no problems and then killing their office email for days.
The final straw happened when Jato stopped service. Customers who had brought their domains and email to Jato were now stuck - the outsource vendor continued email, but at a price. If the ISP supplying the IP address is the one that provides SMTP service, the customer is up and running as soon as they get an IP. If the ISP insists on screwing with domains, problems happen and everyone suffers. |
