smtp block

It figures. After doing a bunch of work to move my backup mailserver to a “virtual server”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/01/29/power-and-virtualisation/, it worked fine for about 10 days, and then suddenly I was seeing no incoming email in the logs. This is a sign of a problem; even when the primary server is working, spammers are always connecting to the backup (in the hopes of getting past filters).

Much testing has determined that rogers is now blocking inbound SMTP on my portion of the network (something they’ve apparently been rolling out for over a year now). The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that…

posted at 11:32 am on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 in Personal, Security | Comments (4)

4 Comments

  1. Reid says:

    Is there a way to specify the port in an MX record? That would be sweet.

  2. Harald Koch says:

    Not yet, but if enough ISPs start blocking, I’m sure it’ll appear…

  3. Mark says:

    Shop around for ISPs. I left bell when they cut off inbound SMTP. Now I’m with Magma.ca. But, i1f you don’t want to switch ISPs then there are forwarding services like dyndns.org’s mailhop.

  4. Harald Koch says:

    My friend Reid is with igs.net; one of their selling features is “no bandwidth cap”, but I don’t usually get close to the 60Gb/month that rogers allows, so I’m not sure if that’s an actual feature for me or not. On the other hand, 3.0Mb + a static IP for $45/month isn’t too bad. dyndns.org wants $30/yr/domain for the service I want, which is almost the difference in price… hmm.

    It looks like Magma has the old istop bandwidth policy; limited during the day, unlimited between midnight and 7AM. Their prices are good, except for the static IP option. Unfortunately, the packages list doesn’t specify a monthly cap, and the FAQ only says “see the package list”. The only misread I can see is that the main packages don’t have a bandwidth cap?

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