METROCAST BLOCKS RESIDENTIAL E-MAIL

[aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net]

   From: Jeff Kinz <jkinz at kinz.org>
   Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 15:34:56 -0500

   If they are filtering for Spam on outbound packets whose dport is 25 then
   I think its probably a good thing.

No?  Content filtering is supposed to be done at the application
level.  Content filtering at the network level is just... data
corruption.

   From: Fred <puissante at lrc.puissante.com>
   Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 06:17:10 -0500

   I think it's a *bad idea* to send your email out across your ISP's
   SMTP servers, because you never know what they are doing with
   it. Plus, with the Homeland Insecurity pushing for more
   surveillance of us civilians, including pushing ISPs to archive all
   outgoing traffic for a month, you just can't trust your ISP to
   protect your privacy.

Yes, there are privacy issues which contraindicate using McISP's mail
relay...

 * Nosy sysadmins reading your email.
 * Sysadmins who are actually doing their job reading your email.
   (I don't care if you're clearing the mail queue or not; you *don't*
   have to know what my girlfriend thinks about my ED.)
 * Systematic email monitoring/scanning/blocking/archiving/reporting.
 * TOSs often explicitly allow for disclosure *without* a warrant.
 * Malicious employees can steal information (I've seen this one firsthand).
 * Malicious employees can alter/destroy information.
 * ISPs don't necessarily take all the security precautions you would.

But, besides privacy, there are MANY MANY other reasons an email user
might not want to use their ISP's smarthost:

 * Your ISP may not relay "MAIL FROM:" addresses not from their domain.
 * An ISP's smarthost doesn't necessarily have the VRFY/ident/retry/routing
   options which you want to use.
 * Email aliases, mailing lists, and address rewriting are out the window.
 * ISPs often don't bother to SSL mail outbound to the 'Net.
   (It would be interesting to see if Metrocrap is even trying to do this...)
 * ISPs have been know to have *almost* correct smarthost configurations.
 * ISPs have been know to have *completely broken* smarthost configurations.
 * Smarthosts have been known to lose mail.
 * Your outbound mail may be erroneously be considered spam/virus/&c and rm'd.
 * You have no control over how your ISP's smarthost resolves MXs.
 * Configuring your own MTA can teach you a lot about how email works.
 * Not using your ISP's mail relay keeps you *in touch with* the current
   state of SMTP on the Internet... and not hide the Internet from you
   behind a relay.
 * Because RFC 822 doesn't say you have to.
 * You simply don't want to.
 * And on, and on...

 and on

 and on

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