Anyone experienced a change in adsl whereby they have just began "monitoring" the SMTP port?

I have a friend of mine who has his own domain name, and they have a Telstra ADSL connection in the office. Dynamic IP, standard sorta deal.

Now two of the four people in the office are using laptops, and roaming between a few different internet connections.

Initially, mail.theirdomain.com was working fine, sending recieving sweet, now, since about 2 weeks ago, Telstra have aparrently began monitoring this port.. Thus, their SMTP server doesnt work, and for them to be able to send mail out, they have to change their SMTP to use bigponds..

I called 133-933, standard experience, waited 20 minutes to speak to some pleb, asked for his supervisor, finally got him, and he eventually told me that the port was not blocked, and was completely open, and I needed to speak to the hosting provider... Ten minutes later, he said it was monitored, and that in fact, I wouldnt be able to use any other SMTP server...

f***ss sake, how can I get anywhere with these twats, I really don't think its a valid reason to force people into static ip's.

Its not "monitored", its blocked :P

It states in the contracts I think that they hold the right to block ports and blah blah blah and they have blocked it now as an attempt to save their network being smashed by people with open relay servers.

A business however should be able to request it to be opened if they are on a business plan, or setup your mail server to relay through the bigpond mail servers

I would check with their domain providers for a problem. Telstra might monitor the port but it won't be blocked. Is their domain hosted by telstra as well ? Sorry I'm a bit confused.

edit: Yes Telstra won't allow you to relay through their servers as Ed's said. Stopped that ages ago.

last edited by Skitza at 13:16:36 22/Aug/06

looks like your going to have to upload into the killobyte stream and reroute through a vast network of domain hyper-architecture. Perhaps we can relay the signal through several dynamic host extensions within the blogosphere?

mail bomb the c***s

theoretically, this policy has been in place for ages, though I've seen a few people complaining indicating that it's only just come into effect for certain users at least.

I am pretty sure that if you ask nicely they will allow your IP explicitly - I'm sure I read comments from users who asked if they could get external access and were allowed.

cocklodgers, that's a new one

No, its not hosted by Telstra, they're just the ISP

It appears to have taken effect about a week ago, I spoke to the hosting providers who are champs and I know personally, and they said that it was telstra tightening s*** up..

I know Telstra have the power to let it happen, its just a matter of getting onto someone who doesnt hate life, which is going to take a few dozen calls I think

I assume their smtp server is outside of their network ? If so they *could* set the smtp server to also listen on a second port like 10025.

If it's inside ( or outside ) their network unless they're also using smtp-auth what are they doing allowing random internet connections ( from roaming staff ) to relay through them ? sounds like a good idea to block them to me!

If they're crying because their mail server can't send out from the local network, then they should just smart-host thru testra's smtp server.

Looks like there's plenty of options to work around it, just need to choose one that suits their particular situation.

last edited by stinky at 15:31:58 22/Aug/06

I dont disagree that there's many solutions, I just dont have a clue what's the best way...

Basically the thing I want to avoid is them having to use mail.bigpond.com, because they cant use it when they're roaming etc.. So I just want a solution thats not going to involve them having to f*** around with settings all the time...

Can I setup something to grab it all and route it to mail.bigpond.com ?

A combination of:
- Change their SMTP port to non-standard and reconfigure the user's mail client and;
- Enable SMTP-auth at their Server and configure mail client, so they don't have an open relay SMTP server for roaming users.

This will allow the roaming users to use thier local SMTP server and Telstra won't be able to block the standard SMTP port (I'm assuming you're referring to port 25).

An alternative solution would be to use VPN so, the roaming users can use the local SMTP server to send email. The small downside of this is that the users will have to VPN into the office first and they'll have to setup VPN server at their end for this to happen.

^^^ Of course this solution won't work if they're putting thier SMTP server in their MX record to handle mail reception. You shouldn't really use do this when you're on Dynamic IP Address anyway so.. Basically it'll solve the send outgoing mail part of the problem.

draw us a network diagram and we'll tell you the best way to do it.

Change ISP

they changed their smtp server to only allow bigpond.com addresses a LONG TIME AGO.

I dont care when you think they changed it, I'm telling you, that this particular customer, until 7 days ago, could use their own SMTP server.

I'll do a network diagram in a tic

yeah this just affected my boss

our work email server was now getting SMTP blocked. So now for SMTP he has to set it as mail.bigpond.com and use his bigpond internet logon for it. POP3 is fine still for our work domain.

works good, still, its annoying tel$tra did it.

Just to let you know, I know of others on business ADSL who have been effected by this. By using smarthost with Exchange, they were able to continue using their own SMTP server. Hope this helps :)

Affected Eds ... they were affected.