Re: How to set multiple SMTP ports?

In article <op.tz2jwq1ynn735j@xxxxxxx>,
"John H Meyers" <jhmeyers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:28:08 -0500, Bill Cole wrote:

keep in mind that whoever decided to put SMTP for mail submission on
port 26 doesn't belong anywhere near a computer serving other people.
This is not a system who you should trust with mail you give a damn about.

It has become popular nonetheless, among hosting companies,
and look who else promotes it:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274842
http://support.kerio.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid
=407&nav=0,1

I would have expected Kerio to not be that stupid.



There is also no universal outgoing non-blocking of port 587,
nor any assurance that port 587 can't be used for spamming as well (see
below),

587 can be used for spamming, but it is not generally useful for the
sort of spamming that makes up the overwhelming majority of spam and the
overwhelming reason for ISP's blocking port 25: direct-to-MX trojan
spam.



so that any old ISP might be blocking *all* those ports
for exactly the same reasons;
see the following tale of unpredictable blocking by AOL, for example:
http://www.jamestopp.com/dfym/2006/02/16/a-confession/

Given the statements on that page which *cannot* be true, I don't trust
any of it. I won't call him a liar, but he surely does not understand
what he's talking about.

I'm not familiar with any ISP blocking 587 as a matter of considered
policy. I know that some have done so briefly as a result of muddled
thinking and irrational exuberance in the deployment of port blocking to
stop spam, but I don't know of any who have kept it in place after users
have complained.

There may be a qualified exception to that at AOL, because at one point
they were doing a very strange session hijacking trick that made all
port 25 and 587 connections from their users talk to their own SMTP
proxies that were slightly broken. It is my understanding that they
backed off on doing that on port 587, but it is possible that they just
made it much less broken or drove off most of the users who cared.


RFCs concerning "Message submission":

The only essential difference between
original RFC2476 (still in "Proposed" status)
and newer RFC4409 (which is in "Draft" status),

Those are not really "status" descriptions, but rather are
"specification maturity levels" and it may not be obvious to people who
haven't buried their heads in the arcana of RFC policies that a
specification at "Draft Standard" level is more mature (i.e. closer to
simply being a "Standard") than is one at "Proposed Standard" level. A
Proposed Standard RFC doesn't get reclassified as a Draft Standard, it
is used as the basis for an updated specification that is published with
a new RFC number and classified as a Draft Standard.

interestingly both sponsored by Qualcomm,

Not Exactly. Rather, they were both co-authored by a Qualcomm employee.

is new section 4.3, requiring authentication,
but RFC4409 is rather new, and may not be enforced:

http://xml.resource.org/public/rfc/html/rfc2476.html
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2476.txt [Dec 1998]
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4409.txt [Apr 2006]

"Official Internet Protocol Standards" (status)
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcxx00.html

You might want to familiarize yourself with the nature of RFC's and how
modern publication and classification of them works, both in principle
and reality. For a start, note that there is no such thing as
enforcement of RFC's as if they were laws. RFC2476 couldn't do anything
more than suggest SMTP AUTH as optional because it was published ahead
of the first RFC defining SMTP AUTH, which was being worked on by the
same working group at the time. From a standards process view, RFC4409
is not a new standard, it is the current version of the same
specification as RFC2476.

--
Now where did I hide that website...
.

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