[ale] If you're on Bellsouth DSL, I recommend changing providers.

[Byron A Jeff]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 12:25:39PM -0400, Mike Murphy wrote:
> What's the major problem?: I own my own domain. My email comes to my 
> address at that domain. I do this for 2 reasons: 1. mike at tyderia.net is 
> a whole lot cooler than something like mmichael453 at bellsouth.net. 2. 
> when I decide to use my choice as a consumer and switch providers, I can 
> take my email address with me.

No problems there.

> 
> To make this work for me, I have to have that mail delivered somewhere. 
> I have the choice of paying another third part to catch it so I can read 
> it, or having the mail directed to my host connected to the internet.
>  In 
> fact, I do both (so that I have a backup mx to catch mail when my 
> primary host is down). In general, this works well, since I can use the 
> host I control to filter spam and virii, and can read my mail via an ssh 
> connection to a shell from anywhere in the world.

That's fine.

> 
> Yes, there are other alternatives to this solution that may or may not 
> work as well, including webmail solutions and 3rd party hosting, but for 
> the amount of control I get, the overall cost of the solution to me, and 
>  the benefits of having a 'portable' email address, I've found over the 
> last many years that this works best.

BTW you are aware that you are not the target because...

> 
> Now, I'm a responsible systems administrator, and I run a secure relay. 

Bingo! But you are the exception, not the rule unfortunately.

> I have sendmail forwarding my mail through bellsouth's mail server (so 
> they can see easily if they want what my volume of mail is, and for that 
> matter what the content of my outbound mail is if they really want). I 
> suspect, since my volume of inbound mail through their system is very 
> close to 0 (really only the spam ^H^H^H^H^H informative messages about 
> bellsouth new services they'd like to sell me), that compared to the 
> average zombied windows box, my actual costs to them are lower than the 
> average. Add to that that I'm not running a warez site on port 80, etc. 
> and I'm almost no trouble to the support department, and I'm paying for 
> their most expensive service (and using their bundled long distance, 
> complete choice plan, etc), and I'd think that I'm exactly the sort of 
> customer they want, and a profitable one at that.

But on what basis do they may exceptions? Take a test? Take a class?
Actually the way that they do it is by offering two classes of service:
residential and business.

You are a profitable customer. However it'll cost them a whole lot more in 
support and everything else to support you than it does for them to cut you
off. You are the 1 in 1000 customer. They lose you, they lose a very small
percentage of their customer base. However continued attacks and blacklisting
from others will cause them to lose a whole lot more than just you.

> 
> I don't care if they want to cut off outbound port 25. I think that's 
> more than sensible, and I applaud them for it, and I suspect many of the 
> other customers unhappy with this would agree. Cutting off inbound port 
> 25 (and the ports for Secure IMAP, secure POP, and secure SMTP, but not 
> their clear text equivalents) is just annoying. And doing so with no 
> customer notification, and technically vapid after the fact 
> "explanation" is inexcusable. Fortunately, since I've got a portable 
> email address, switching isn't all that painful, so I've got 
> speedfactory working on that for me.

But read your TSA. Residential folks don't have the right to offer ANY service.
So BellSouth would be within their rights to firewall off any incoming 
connections that were not requested.

They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. Actually I can apprciate
the fact that they are trying to do something.

And as you pointed out, there are choices.

BAJ