Garden Of Blog

As of today, my current internet service provider Metrocast has closed the use of port 25 (to outside servers) for all consumer customers. Business account customers ($99/month) on static IPs get to use port 25 unrestricted because they are easier to trace and manage.

This is the port that outgoing email traverses. Metrocast does allow the use of its own SMTP outgoing mail server over port 25, but not to other servers (like, mine). And guess what? Metrocast’s domain is blacklisted by SpamCop today, 24 hours of blackhole bliss (grrr) courtesy of something with “cop” in its name… I’ve always hated cops. Sorry, if you’re a cop. Not you, okay? Bottom line is that the unlucky confluence of the port 25 clamp-down and the SpamCop blacklisting of Metrocast’s domain rendered me unable to send email in my usual way.

I enjoyed chewing out the tech support guys at Metrocast so much I called three times tonight. But they were actually a pretty cool bunch. Ben in particular had a great persecptive on the political climate surrounding spam right now and what we might expect coming up. He thinks port 25 users on dynamic ip addresses are going to experience more frequent outages in the near future due to ip blacklisting, and his solution is to move to Gmail. Using Gmail you can forward mail from multiple domains to the Gmail account and reply with the appropriate addresses in the “From:” line, a great feature for users of POP email clients who need to manage email in multiple domains.

So, that may be my solution. I hate to bow to Gmail though. I may just use my own domain’s webmail during “port 25 outages” and keep pushing mail through the “old port” whenever possible.

It’s no joy watching spam flood into my POP email client, not phased in the least, while I am unable to send out a legitimate message. Spam has finally won.