Yesterday, I found out that my ISP (cable guys: Rogers) blocked access on port 25 (SMTP) to any other mail servers than its own. Everything else works fine including POP3 (110) port to receive emails or web surfing.

I contacted their customer support twice and it was the same story: the only way to do it is to use their SMTP server. I tried to explain them that is important for me to have emails sent by my email servers with no luck. Then, I searched on the Internet to find out how widespread is this policy, and I found many others complaining about it, especially from big ISP companies.

Why this rule was applied only now? Don’t know. Why there are no exceptions? Don’t know. They simply blocked an Internet port and that’s it.

Of course there are workarounds. One is to use GMail which offers POP3/SMTP access, on non-standard ports:

GMail offers POP/SMTP access to its email. Here are the settings:

POP server: pop.gmail.com.
Port: 995.
Require SSL: Yes.
User name: your Gmail email address.
Make sure your user name includes both your Gmail account name and “@gmail.com”. If your Gmail account name is “qwertz.qwertz”, for example, type “qwertz.qwertz@gmail.com” as the user name.
Password: your Gmail password.

SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com.
Port: 465.
Require SSL/STARTTLS: Yes.
Require SMTP authentication: Yes.
User name: your Gmail email address.
Password: your Gmail password.
( http://www.iopus.com/guides/bestpopsmtp.htm ) 

Other solution is simply to use other port than 25. Many hosting companies already implemented in cPanel an alternative solution openning usually port 26. If you have CPanel/WHM + EXIM see Service Manager -> exim on another port. If this policy will continue we’ll see email sending on all ports available.What’s the use of blocking port 25? All spammers could easily send emails on another port and this stupid rule only block decent, non-technical people. Looks more than an administrative solution to group (and maybe scan & analyse) all emails sent, from a single place. If this is only one small step to control user access to the Internet what would be next? Mandatory HTTP proxies (port 80) to control web surfing?