Tong Family

Well, here in Dallas, this happened again, another ISP (like Rogers two months ago) is blocking port 25 it looks like and also the SSL SMTP ports too. What a pain! Others have had like “blogd.com”:http://www.blogd.com/archives/002253.html have had this problem around it is one of the top 10 most read “discussions”:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=828731&tstart=1485 on apple forums, so it is happening more.

ISPs claim that this prevents spam but it is so silent that it just causes agony with users.

There are really only three solutions:

# Use webmail and forget about using that fancy Outlook, Entourage or Mac Mail and use web mail interfaces to read and send mail.
# Figure out if the ISP has an open SMTP server that they will let you use. Now this is really hard with hotel networks for instance or when you are renting a condo and don’t have an account with that ISP.
# Hope that one of your hosting folks has an SMTP server on something other than port 25. For instance, “TQHosting”:http://tqhosting.com also supports port 26 as a work around. So if you set it permanently to port 26 in your email program, you’ll never have the problem. Most hosters won’t even understand what you are talking about though and most ISP tech support folks won’t know or will deny it. It is sometimes called OP25 which means Outgoing Port 25 denial.