More on Comcast
Jan. 20th, 2008 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurSo just to add insult to injury: for the past five days, we haven't been able to send any email through our Comcast account. No idea why: it just kept refusing our email. At first, I assumed this was just their servers being flaky (which is sadly common), but after a while I started to think there was something genuinely wrong.
Well, now I know what, thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dsrtao. Apparently, middle of last week, they abruptly shut off port 25, the standard email-sending port. If you want to send email, you have to do it through the unstandard port 587. And if they gave us any warning or notice, you couldn't prove it by me. I suspect they will claim that they told us -- buried somewhere in one of those spams they shovel at us once or twice a month that are full of services that some third party is trying to sell to us through them.
Enough. These people aren't just bad at customer service, they are unforgivably incompetent. The switch is going to take some time (moving email addresses is always painful at best, and is going to be far worse when I have to assume that there will be no decent forwarding), but I can't take this nonsense any more. These people are so contemptuous of their customers, they don't deserve to have any...
Well, now I know what, thanks to
dsrtao. Apparently, middle of last week, they abruptly shut off port 25, the standard email-sending port. If you want to send email, you have to do it through the unstandard port 587. And if they gave us any warning or notice, you couldn't prove it by me. I suspect they will claim that they told us -- buried somewhere in one of those spams they shovel at us once or twice a month that are full of services that some third party is trying to sell to us through them.Enough. These people aren't just bad at customer service, they are unforgivably incompetent. The switch is going to take some time (moving email addresses is always painful at best, and is going to be far worse when I have to assume that there will be no decent forwarding), but I can't take this nonsense any more. These people are so contemptuous of their customers, they don't deserve to have any...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
587 is standard
Date: 2008-01-21 02:47 am (UTC)Actually, port 587 is standard—or, at least, a standard. See RFC-4409, "Message Submission for Mail". This goes back 10 years (originally RFC-2476); the idea is to segregate message submission (which should require authentication) from message relay (which should not), and to permit firewalls to tell the difference.
Still, it would be nice if they'd provided some way for MUAs to tell when they should be talking to 587 instead of 25. The RFC doesn't even mention transition issues (!), but I suppose a smart MUA could detect that 25 isn't getting through and offer to try 587.