[ale] Hellsouth's wonderful email service

[Chuck Huber]

Well... The Hellsouth saga will soon be over.

<vent>
I knew when I signed up for their service I'd be sorry.  And I am.
Why'd I do it?  Well, I've been on Speed Factory forever. Upon
relocation to the mountains of North Carolina, I found that HellSouth
was the only company to offer DSL service in my area.  Hence, I
chose them from a field of 1 company - what a choice.

I took a while, but I learned that outbound connections to port
25 are blocked.  Thanks HellSouth.  So I reconfigured sendmail
to send everything through their mail server only to find out that
relaying was not allowed from the IP address I was using. The 550
error also stated that the solution was to connect from the
HellSouth Internet Service.  Duh... what did they think I was using?

Then there's this authentication thing.  Their stated purpose was
"to reduce junk e-mail or 'spam' on the Internet."

So... I'm now stuck not being able to send mail.  After about 30
hours of conversations with their tech non-support, I finally was
able to talk to a supervisor who admitted that they block port 25,
something that, of course, was not disclosed when I signed up, and
that they didn't allow relaying of emails through their mail server.
To correct the problem, I would have to sign up for Business DSL, a
prerequisite of which was a Business phone line.

Granted, I'm not the Winbloze user with whom they're so accustomed
to speaking.  I host my own domain (so mail appears to be from
cehuber.org) and an family email list (about 30 or so users - all kin).

All in all, I found that HellSouth tech-nonsupport team doesn't even
know how to speak English.  One technician (they really shouldn't
call themselves technicians) asked me if I wanted him to "axe" his
supervisor to get an answer - a vernacular prevalent in the black
community.  Another tech said "try [this] and if that don't work ...",
yet another abuse of the language.  Not one person was knowledgeable,
they seemed to be just following scripts - kinda like memorizing
phonemes of lyrics to a song written in a foreign language. (I recall
a Star Trek episode that said something like "... saying 'Juliet on
the balcony' - without having read the play, it's meaningless."

</vent>

Well... to end the ISP nightmare once and for all, I'm renting an
unmanaged server somewhere up in Virginia.  It has Red Hat Fedora
installed on it and WebMin.

The problem I'm facing right now it trying to configure sendmail
to handle virtual email domains.  On my system at home, I've been
using linuxconf to do this quite easily.  (As bad as linuxconf is
in other areas, it was able to handle this one function quite
efficiently.)

Well linuxconf hasn't been around since RH 8.0 (I think), and WebMin
seems to fall short of the functionality I found in linuxconf.

Can anyone give me some pointers as to how to setup virtual email
domains with these tools?  Alternatively, I can install a different
MTA that has such functionality.

One thing I considered doing to bypass the blocked port 25 was to
use iptables to forward outbound connections to port 25 to an outside
host, then translate them back on the other end and forward them right
out.  I haven't explored that to finality - just considered it.

Thanks in advance to all,
    - Chuck

--
"The purpose of encryption is to protect good people
from bad people, not to protect bad people from the government."
    -- Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time
with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
    -- Thomas Jefferson
"If there must be trouble let it be in my day,
that my child may have peace."
    -- Thomas Paine
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution,
are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to
defend them against all attacks."
    -- Samuel Adams
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
   safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    -- Benjamin Franklin