Tired of Being Screwed By Cox (no pun intended)

[Michael Sheldon]

>The bright folks at Cox have struck us with another one of their
>brilliant ideas again. Apparently the Cox put a jimmy hat on port 25.
>Do you have an smtp server and also subscribe to Cox (http://www.cox.com
>and http://www.cox.net)? Well, you poor sap. You are no longer allowed
>to send email through your smtp server because Cox, in their infinite
>wisdom, has now blocked port 25.

yada, yada, yada....

Sorry to rain on your parade, but in my opinion, it's about bloody time the
broadband providers started doing this. I run a mailserver (in a colo
facility) for a couple dozen domains, and the amount of spam I get
originating from broadband hosts is shameful.

Was I affected by this? Yes. I route all my outbound mail through my colo
server. Did it even slow me down? No, I just set my smtp server to listen on
an additional high-numbered port that Cox isn't filtering on. If this wasn't
an option, I'd just route it through Cox's server.

Folks like us who run our own servers are in the *extreme* minority. Cox is
not aiming their service at us, they're aiming it at "Joe Average" who
wouldn't know an SMTP server from his left toe, but instead will happily
open every attachment sent to him, eventually resulting in his system
spewing trash to the world.


Michael J. Sheldon
http://www.desertraven.com/
Make a fast friend, adopt a greyhound!