[KLUG Members] note on charter cable isp connections

[Adam Williams]

>>As an Earthlink/Mindspring DSL customer for about a year
>>I never found them blocking incoming connections.  I was quite
>>happy with their service.
>>One thing I -didn't- like though was the dropping of all outgoing
>>packets to port 25 unless it was their mailserver.
>>It didn't mention this anywhere in the contract I signed up with
>>(beleive me... I looked when I found out what theyw ere doing) and
>>they flatly refused to lift the ban on an account by account basis.
>SSH tunnel your SMTP needs.  That's always been my workaround.
>Either that, or setup the external mailserver to answer on another port
>as well as port 25.

There are two drop-dead problems with such a solution -

1. To deliver SMTP via SSH you need to have an MDA somewhere you can use
on a box that will let you SSH in.  Most people don't have that.

2. It it worthless to receive mail.  I wish I could tell other people's
MDAs to attach to port 8000 when doing SMTP, but SMTP is port 25.  Which
means you need a deflector somewhere to push the SMTP over the SSH
tunnel,  leaving you with the same requirement of having access to
another box somewhere.