Problems with email using BT

[AnthonyL]

1) Who provides your own domain? 2) What do you use as your outgoing mail server?

[Roger Hayter]

I agree. I get 0 - 0.8Mbps on a 9km cable, and that has occasional faults which generally bring the availability down to 0 - 10%.

[Roger Hayter]

Nildram used to do the same, unless you asked nicely. I thought it was pretty general.

[Martin Brown]

If you are that far down in speed it is worth talking to your ISP or doing some research into what alternatives might work for you. Options in North Yorkshire include peer to peer microwave links at 20M and upwards (largish initial install cost but monthly about the same) or

3/4G and an external antenna on a Mifi all you can eat data deal.

There should be a superfast broadband <your county> initiative if you live somewhere with rural 10km cable runs of decrepit wet string.

BT were persuaded to give a neighbour an EE 3G modem because they couldn't provide him with sensible internet speed or reliability. Unwelcome side effect was he lost his BT email address when he switched.

Almost every farm and anyone with line of sight onto a node is on the microwave deal around here. It was Clannet now taken over by Quickline.

[Tim Streater]

That explains superficially, but not how I get a public key, nor how the remote end gets a private key, nor the relationship between these keys.

In which case I'm less interested. Of about seven mail servers I get mail from, or send via, I'm using TLS for four. So that's presumably secure to the mail server. That will then communicate with the remote mail server - can they choose to use a secure channel for that? Then of course, whether the remote sender/recipient uses TLS is not under my control.

[John Rumm]

Our ADSL2+ service manages about 2Mb down 0.6 up with a loop attenuation of 62dB. To be fair its relatively stable, and only completely fails once or twice a year. Its got slower with age - there was a time it could do about 3 to 3.5Mb about 10 years ago. Most of it is overhead, so it can get affected after very heavy rain, but does not suffer as much as some.

It took a couple of years of waiting for FTTP to move from FTTPoD to actually installed and useable - but now its here its a whole different world :-)

Indeed, and also technically more difficult to service even if the coercion / subsidy etc is there to pay for it.

[John Rumm]

Its quite common for the default setup on many mail servers to only accept either SSL or STARTLS connections now.

[Roger Hayter]

Current game plan is a government subsidised community fibre partnership, and you don't get the subsidy if you've already got a reasonable connection, no matter where from. AIUI, anyway.

[The Natural Philosopher]

mail RELAYS.

[Chris Bartram]

Yes, increasingly so.

[John Rumm]

Not all mail servers are relays.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh dear. But all servers accepting SMTP traffic from end users are. The rest accept POP or IMAP connections to recieve mail

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[Andy Burns]

Not true, SMTP servers often split message transfer and message submission roles between ports 25 and 587, there's no requirement to allow relaying.

e.g. for some sites I have configured one server to accept email without authentication but for delivery to local email ddresses only, and another server that requires authentication, but will relay to external addresses.

The former for dozens of dumbish devices (UPSes, printers, etc) that want to report error conditions, without any danger of them being able to spam the world.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is a mail server.

That is a relay.

[John Rumm]

Who mentioned SMTP? (clue - only you)

No shit sherlock.

And, are they mail servers?

And is a POP or IMAP server a relay?

Good, glad that's clear. Now wind your neck in, since you are not adding any value to this discussion.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thats because I know that when you send mail through a server, you use SMTP.

Yes, but they are not mail relays

No.

Good, glad that's clear. Now wind your neck in, since you are not adding any value to this discussion. >

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[polygonum_on_google]

IDNET do NOT offer FTTP for my location.

There might indeed be an unresolved cable fault. I now don't care.

[polygonum_on_google]

As I posted just now, IDNET don't cover my location (for whatever reason). I can't now remember which we dismissed on grounds of cost, and which on non-availability.

Hence, we went from Plusnet to BT. (And persuaded Plusnet to refund pre-paid line. Although theoretically non-refundable they accepted that at time of renewal we had no other wired options.) Plusnet were actually pretty good - agreed the refund and automatically refunded something like the day after we switched.

[polygonum_on_google]

If we had been genuinely out of town, we might very well have had the option of some sort of wide area wifi or microwave. Lots in the area do. But the suppliers of that assume we are covered by broadband so don't even think about covering us. Why, even 50 metres or so down the road near neighbours had better ADSL and FTTC options. It was just a few of us not able to get anything better.

There is even some non-BT fibre on the other side of the town.

We tried 4G but found we got too many dropouts to be acceptable.

About the only other option we came up with was satellite. But having experience of that, we didn't really want to go down that road.

Further, all the people who plan these things kept saying we were in the plan for an upgrade (to FTTC at the time) but that kept disappearing.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I thought we were talking FTTC