Problems with email using BT

I gave up on hotmail some time ago on virgin. It was flakey to say the least and for some weird reason I could not enable pop3 even though it was allowed previously. Now I can send to and from hotmail addresses from virgin ones but my own hotmail account never did work again. I was on one of the bt piggy backers before. i have just had issues with Gmail as my new hub on Virgin seems to have made Gmail think I'm a hacker on my own account. Bah humbug.

Brian

I still don't know why people would leave plusnet for Batty telecockups in the first place. Brian

"Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)" snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.uk> posted

Gmail is the worst offender in this respect IME. If the sender's SMTP does not "match" their "From" address [using Gmail's own interpretation of "match"], they delay the message by a variable and sometimes unlimited time.

I suspect this is little to do with spam. Rather that they are trying to force as many people as possible to use Gmail's own SMTP servers, so they can collect more personal information to sell.

The certificate that assures you that you are talking securely to your selected mailserver and not to some man-in-the-middle attacker.

The bug is that in certain circumstances the security settings override can get lost. I think the trigger is a timeout somewhere in the chain.

Still unanswered by the OP :(

It could be that as yet there isn't enough demand and that OpenWretch charge other ISPs usurious prices for the fibre installation and access.

Not uncommon in rural areas. My figures are not dissimilar although on a very good dry day I can get as high as 6Mbps. That is on basic ADSL 2+ since there is no FTTC close enough to me to work. 2Mbps is more typical for the average household here - I have a particularly good line.

Amazing what tea and biscuits will do for telcom field staff morale ;-)

Back in the day, ISPs would commonly hijack port 25 SMTP traffic and silently push it through their own SMTP server instead as an anti-spam measure. Even though nowadays other ports are used, is that not still the case?

Is there an RFC for these?

I think only BT has the power to do that. And possibly mobile operators.

No one lese wnats to spend that much CPU power doing something that is essentually breaking the internet protocols.

No: if you try and sent to an arbitraty port 25 you can.

It may not accept your traffic, though.

It might be that you have a SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record configured in your domain that specifies which mail servers can be trusted as legitimate ones for the domain. This is generally a good thing, since it makes it harder for people to spoof email purporting to come from your domain.

However if the SPF record does not include the SMTP server you are now using to relay messages, then your mail will tend to look more "spammy" to the recipients, and has a higher chance of being discarded before delivery.

(You can normally see this in the headers of an email received from you

- so send yourself a message and look at the headers (CTRL + U in thunderbird. See if you can see a line in the header starting "X-SPF: Received-SPF:")

You can check your domain to see if it has a SPF record. Open a command prompt, and type

nslookup

That will drop you into the DNS lookup utility.

Type:

set type=txt

Now type your domain name without any leading www etc:

example.com

If there are no text records in the domain entry, then it will just display basic information about what the name servers etc. If there is a SPF record, then you will see a line that will start with "v=spf1 mx"

If there is a SPF record, then you will need to make sure it matches the system you are using for sending mail.

There is more details on SPF here:

Other than BT, there are only a handful of ISPs that offer FTTP at the moment. They tend to be the more specialist / smaller ones.

There is a list here:

Had similar here - the unresolved cable "fault" was that there was 6km of the stuff!

And of course its common practice to sign in to a relay to send email.

I had to implement that in order to be able to use my own mail relay from anywhere in the world. Without being abused by spammers.

I get upwards of 100 attacks an hour from people trying...the amusing things is thay use the same form of password as big mail relays like BT used - the username is of the form 'name@domain'. Mine however are not of that form at all.

Good lord. Thats not many is it? But the three old favourites of A&A IDNET asnd ZEN are all there.

I wonder why the others havent bothered?

When we all compared how much we paid for broadband IDNET were as cheap as anyone else.

Nope. Its very unilikely that noise levels will give you a 0-4Mpbs range on a daily basis on a clean cable.

Its far more likely there were bad joints and crackles on it.

Dunno, but it's essentially like the relationship between HTTP and HTTPS: it's just SMTP wrapped inside a secure transport. It's becoming increasingly commonplace now.

Yes. In the old days it was commonplace to have an open relay, but the spammers misused that a lot. After that, it became common to limit relaying to "local" IPs- either your LAN, or an ISP's customer. Nowadays SMTP-Auth (and often over TLS) is the way many ISPs do it.

Probably with plenty of bad joints often flooded with brackish water if our local configuration is anything to go by. They sometimes upgrade exceptionally bad lengths of cable but there is neither rhyme nor reason to what gets done. They only do the bare minimum they can get away with.

Rural telecoms like the rural mail service is simply not profitable.

Hotmail will not budge an inch from their published policies, ever, IMO.

Anyway, if it's greylisting, surely they should accept the mail at a second/third attempt?

BT at one time used to block TCP/25 to anywhere but their own SMTP servers for domestic customers. Not sure if that's still the case.

A clean line of 5km will just about do 5Mbps. That is pretty much what I have.

A typical line back to the exchange at that distance will do 2-3Mbps or less if the house phone wiring is old and decrepit (as many houses are). Bell wire hack is always worth a try in any property with slow internet.

My line attenuation is 48dB but many neighbours see 60+dB losses.

Are you sure?

That is a horrendous situation if true.

It certainly isnt true now as a friend uses my relay to send no problem via BT

I only ever came across THAT on my sisters German installation with te state run telecoms comany (she was on a modem years after UK broadband) where the ROUTER came supplied with all SMTP traffic blacklisted apart from explicit whitelisted entries for google, microsoft and hotmail etc.

I added my own server and all was well.

Pretty sure, yes. One place I help support had it's own branded ISP at one time, back when you had to pay for dial-up time. We discontinued that, but had to retain the mail domain and migrate it elsewhere. The users migrated away for connectivity to other ISPs, but retained the email.

Then one day, the SMTP stopped working for BT customers, so loads of support calls.

Indeed. I think they thought better of it.