Request for assistance

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

David Kramer wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 December 2002 09:16 am, Mark Glassberg wrote:
> 
>>I've been looking for a new isp and tried intergate.com.  They don't
>>support linux, but everything went well until it came to sending mail.
>>After much experimentation, it seems that their smtp service only
>>recognizes mail where the domain of the sender is that of their dns'.
>>Two questions:  Does this observation/conclusion make any sense?  If
>>so, is there anything I can do to get my mail accepted?
> 
> 
> Yes.  Most ISP's have this restriction to prevent relaying.
> 
> What can you do?  ummm... use their domain name?
> 
> What domain name are you trying to use?  Do you have your own mail server at 
> home?  Tell us more about your setup.

My guess is that he owns a domain (perhaps hosted at an outside web hosting company), and is trying to use that name in his email, but wants to relay mail through the ISP because he's not running his own mail server.

The ISPs that I am familiar with check the origin of email by IP address, which is relatively hard to fake (especially when combined with proper packet filtering on their routers), rather than by domain name, which is easy to fake. If Intergate were using that method, there would be no problem, since the email is coming from a correct address.

It may be that intergate.com is doing both, for whatever reason. They might, for instance, be trying to enforce a policy of not allowing residential customers to have their own domains, and getting them to pay for more expensive commercial service. I'd consider a policy like that to be a good reason not to do business with them.

I presume we're talking about dialup here. If so, running your own mail server isn't really a viable option; if delivery of mail is delayed because the receiver is temporarily unavailable, and you then disconnect from the Internet, the mail won't go through. If we're talking broadband, running your own server has a lot of advantages.