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My ISP Has Closed Port 25

Horrortaxi

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
Sometime Monday night my ISP closed Port 25 to any SMTP server but their own. I understand that this is a common practice among ISPs to try to reduce spammers' access to email accounts (worthless though it may be). Anyway, I have many email accounts using many SMTP servers. I can send all my mail through my ISP's SMTP, but it has some reliability issues so I'd rather use different ones. The ISP's tech support site doesn't allow Mac browsers (that alone would get them dumped if there was any competition for cable tv) and the 1st tier tech support people are totally clueless. Does anybody have any ideas on ports/techniques to get other SMTPs to work? I've tried SSL on port 465 and authenticated on port 26 with no success. I heard these might work.

If it matters, my ISP is Charter and I use Mail.app.
 
B

besson3c

macrumors member
Apr 9, 2003
98
0
Do you manage these email servers? If so, you could open up a MTA to listen on a different port, such as 2525. Or, you could setup a firewall to redirect requests on an alternate port (e.g. 2525) to port 25. I haven't gotten the latter working though.

You can't just try SMTP auth or SSL encryption without knowing that your ISP has these services enabled. Without either of these, I'd be tempted to switch email providers anyway. I'm not a big fan of sending passwords in plain text.
 
Horrortaxi

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
My primary mail address is a .mac address and the other 2 are on my domains. I don't know how much control I have over those but Charter won't let me access any of them.

I guess I need to go higher on their tech support totem pole and see what they have available.

Would a port scan of smtp.charter.net tell me anything? Or should I just plug port numbers into my mail app and see if anything happens?
 
neut

neut

macrumors 68000
Nov 27, 2001
1,843
0
here (for now)
Horrortaxi said:
My primary mail address is a .mac address and the other 2 are on my domains. I don't know how much control I have over those but Charter won't let me access any of them.

I guess I need to go higher on their tech support totem pole and see what they have available.

Would a port scan of smtp.charter.net tell me anything? Or should I just plug port numbers into my mail app and see if anything happens?
Click to expand...

i had the same issue with CableOne here in the NW. all i had to do is change the outgoing mail server to 'mail.cableone.net' and use it for all outgoing. incoming shouldn't be affected by the blockage. have you tried 'mail.enterservicenamehere.com/net/etc' as an alternate? maybe im not understanding the problem correctly.

hope that was some help.


peace.
 
Horrortaxi

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
I can run all my outgoing mail through my ISP's server, but it isn't the most reliable of servers. To counter that I started using other mail services.
 
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