Port 25 Blocking Can Ruin the Holidays
by
Brett Bumeter
Every year we travel to visit with relatives somewhere. Sometimes we go to New York, or Illinois or Missouri or Atlanta or North Carolina or somewhere.
When we stay with relatives that have DSL, we often run into the Holiday spoiler, Port 25 blocking. Port 25 blocking is an attempt by DSL companies(not Cable internet, just dsl) to stop users from sending spam emails down their pipeline. They basically, only want people to use their own email. You know the worthless email account they force you to take when you sign up for their DSL service.
If you do not use their service, then they get paranoid that you are a spammer. So you then have to jump through major hoops setting up your outgoing POP3 email in order to send out a email.
It creates a symptom that makes you think that your computer is broken, that Outlook doesn’t work and that you will go full boar crazy in 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
This Thanksgiving, I ran into Port 25 blocking with Frontier DSL in upstate New York. Years ago when I worked for Motorola a related company, Frontier Wireless used to be one of my customers before they were consumed by Verizon Wireless in the formation of that company. Frontier however is a serious hold out in the back woods of upstate New York, the last frontier (in the east?).
So anyway, Frontier has extremely difficult Port 25 blocking processes setup. I’m used to Bellsouth, where you only have to change the outgoing mail server from whatever it should be to mail.bellsouth.net, but with Frontier you actually need the email address and password of the person who actually set up the DSL account with Frontier.
Now, in case you are wondering below is the link to the actual page that walks you how to setup your system for Frontier.
If you are wondering what type of person might spam the BFE areas of upstate New York, let me suggest that we are not talking about the city. Some bubba is not likely to pull up in your drive way (after driving 30 minutes into the middle of no where) to then crack open a laptop and sniff out your free wifi, so that he can spam the world with male enhancement email offerings. So this level of control, is a bit excessive.
Someday, someone will come up with a universal access system that proves that people are not spammers.
