[olug] Cox and port 25

[Jay Hannah]

Jeff Hinrichs wrote:
> From: "Phil Brutsche" <phil at brutsche.us>
> > Residential customers I can almost understand.
> >
> > But business customers?  Nothing but trouble there...
> Yeah, I've got them running on he.net servers.  Pretty much problem free.
>
> Oh well, live and get burned<g>

Aside from the frustrating fact that I had no notice of what the hell
happened, I thing it's a Good Thing in the spam wars. Once I knew what
happened it took me all of 5 minutes to start using Cox's SMTP gateway,
and now everything is back to normal for me. 

>From an ISP perspective if you're trying to stop tens of thousands of
high speed customers from downloading spam software and/or getting
hacked for spam abuse purposes; blocking outbound port 25 seems like an
effective way to stop the majority of abuse cases.

While I would have appreciated a postcard in the mail before they did
it, I understand their motivations, the action seems reasonable, and I
applaud them for engaging the spam issue instead of ignoring it. This
seems like a pretty drastic measure, but apparently their other less
intrusive tactics weren't panning out in the long run...

My "new" SMTP gateway (smtp.central.cox.net) is only in one blacklist so
far:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ip4r.ch?ip=68.1.17.19

j