SMTP solution when on the road?

P

(Pete Cresswell)

Per Tina - AffordableHOST, Inc,:
More and more hosts are opening up an alternate port, so that their
customers can continue to send email from (e-mail address removed)...without
having to be tied to their ISPs SMTP server.

Can somebody elucidate this for someone who knows next to nothing?
Why would I want to send mail without going through my ISP's SMTP server?
 
A

Andy Dingley

It was somewhere outside Barstow when "(Pete Cresswell)"
Why would I want to send mail without going through my ISP's SMTP server?

Typically the ISP's outgoing SMTP server will only accept connections
from the "customer" face of their network.

When you're on the road, your route to places may be quite different.
You're probably connecting through some coffee shop's wireless
network. Your ISP sees this as "foreign" and won't let you connect.

Back when the roaming connection was a dial-up modem and a piece of
string from the laptop, then you signed up to a clueful ISP that
supported widespread roaming and used them. You were away from home,
but you were still in the "customer" space and things worked as
normal. The wireless coffee shops kill that.

All this _should_ be easy, but it isn't. SMTP doesn't have a good user
authentication mechanism built into it. So we get these topology
kludges instead.
 
T

Toby Inkster

(Pete Cresswell) said:
Why would I want to send mail without going through my ISP's SMTP server?

Perhaps your ISP doesn't *have* an SMTP server. (BT Open World? AOL?)

Perhaps it's inadequate. (Slow, silently drops e-mails, rejects e-mails
bigger than 2MB, whatever.)
 

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