[RndTbl] Shaw email - new woes

[Trevor Cordes]

On 2015-04-25 Hartmut W Sager wrote:
> I have a simple solution - don't be dependent on the whims of your
> ISP for mail servers.

I'm sort of half-dependent.  I'm running all my own sendmail servers.
Incoming is all direct to me, but outgoing I'm forced through Shaw's
smarthost since they block outgoing port 25 to all but that one host.
If ISPs didn't block port 25 (net neutrality anyone?) I wouldn't even
have to use their smarthost (not to open that discussion again...).

> For a Tucows/OpenSRS reseller, that SMTP server costs $0.50 per month
> - a negligible cost.

That sounds great, I didn't know about that.  I will see if I can find
it in their ever-changing wacky interface (unless you know the secret
location!).  Any gotchas or limitations?

Or Adam's VPS ideas, but I'm loathe to pay for something that *should*
be free (and once was free).  It's not money, it's principle.  (RANT:
the net was supposed to be about everyone being a server, not just a
consumer, but they take away ports one by one saying "you aren't
allowed to do that, go pay X company $Y/month to do it or buy our
double/triple business plan pricing where you're still not allowed to
do it but we'll turn a blind eye". /RANT)

Ahhh.... I just spotted the reply from Shaw... this explains EVERYTHING:

"We are in the middle of transitioning our spamcontrol to cloudmark and
as you seem to send out via our server you were more than likely
blocked. The blocks are in place for 24 hours and then are lifted."

"I would suggest you use mail.shaw.ca or even the direct IP
64.59.128.135. In future I should suggest you attempt a telnet into the
mail port and if it doesn’t resolve you could likely be blocked again."

Interesting, so they are implementing blocking via DNS if I read that
right?  Hmm... If I get blocked again, I might just hardcode their
smarthost's IP into my sendmail.mc line... That might explain the weird
domain in the original SMTP diag email... they were returning me a
bogus domain name that doesn't resolve as a means to block.  If I'm
reading all this correctly...

How come whenever a company outsources email it becomes worse than
useless?  Grrrr...