So apparently, Cablevision in their immense wisdom, decides that every single user will only be able to connect to one server on port 25. Care to guess which one? That's right! Cablevision's! Here in Long Island, Cablevision broadband is called Optimum Online (Optonline) and it's not exactly the "cleanest" ISP out there. I know a lot of servers that have Optonline on their blacklists due to the large amount of spam and other questionable user activities.

Apparently, their solution to idiot users who click on email viruses is to do this asinine blocking crap. So now, every single outbound email I send, unless it's via webmail, has to go through their mail.optonline.net SMTP relay.

Oh, what's that? You have a third party email that you use specifically for sending large files or overall speed or redundancy? Sorry, sucks to be you.

If you're on any Cablevision network, if this hasn't happened to you yet, don't worry, it's coming.

Although I know they've got their heads up their asses and they won't do a damn thing, I would still suggest that you still send a letter of complaint to your ISP. I don't know if Optonline the brand for their entire broadband product, but if you're on it, send email to support@optonline.net to lodge a complaint.

Cox blocks outgoing port 25 too. I think the reason is so that their users can't spam. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if ISP's that don't block port 25 end up having all port 25 blocked from their IP's for folks doing black listings of spammers. It's a bit of a pain for savvy folks, but the end result is a whole lot less spam in the world and that's a good thing.

Actually no, most of those people have a server set up externally from their home (seeing that many come from a "spam" domain). All they do on their home PC is send the mail from their client to their domain server - then the domain server uses some sort of listserv type service. Since they partially control that server, they can adjust their SMTP connection port to something other than 25 and easily circumvent this block. The same thing can be done for viruses too, since many viruses now set up their own SMTP host.

Not to mention the fact that if the ISPs weren't so damn lazy they could easily set up a SMTP port sniffer on their router which auto-terminates connections after a threshold has been reached - either by size or number of messages. It's not brain surgery. In fact, since most of these companies can send reset commands to your modem, they could even just kick you off the network if they believe you're infected. Once again, this is a system they could easily automate.

All blocking port 25 does is limit your outbound connections to external SMTP hosts that you can't control, therefore limiting your outbound email service to just Cablevision (or whomever).

Well, it blocks the uninformed, unsavvy spammers at any rate.