No, blocking port 25 for external SMTP mail servers is not standard. In fact it would inhibit the use of services such as Google Apps mail / GMail and many other external mail services that provide POP/SMTP capability.
Is there a possibility you are misinterpreting what is actually blocked? For instance many ISP's register their dynamic IP addresses that are assigned to customers with services such as SPAMHaus Policy Block List (PBL http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/index.lasso) as not being permitted to send mail directly. This means if you send a message to say [EMAIL PROTECTED] through your locally hosted James SMTP server, Comcast will look up the address of your mail server and see that your ISP has PBL'd it and thus the Comcast mail server will reject the message. Perhaps your ISP really is blocking port 25 as you say, but the above is far more likely scenario. But as you have discovered, the work around is to use your ISP's SMTP server just as you would for an email client such as Outlook Express, etc. Or you could host your mail server externally some place where you have control of IP address registering etc. Such as here: https://www.rapidvps.com/?vps=14265 ----- Original Message ----- From: "david.moss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <server-user@james.apache.org> Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 8:02 PM Subject: ISP blocking port 25 stops outgoing mail After half a day trying to get James to forward outgoing mail to the Internet I was at my wits end. Everything seemed to be configured correctly, James was accepting the message but it disappeared into a black hole. Incoming mail worked fine. My existing mail account with the ISP worked fine. It is always tempting to blame the new software in this situation, but it wasn't the case. My ISP, Telstra Bigpond, blocks port 25 for all but its own smtp server. Apparently this is an anti-spam measure that you only find out about when you try to run your own mail server. Most customers never encounter limitation. Old discussion forums indicate that blocking port 25 for all but the ISPs own service is quite common in the industry. I've posted this article in the hope it may help save others the same anxiety I felt when James failed to send outgoing e-mail. The solution was to configure James to use the ISP's nntp server as a gateway. The James config file has a template that makes it easy: <!-- A single mail server to deliver all outgoing messages. --> <!-- This is useful if this server is a backup or failover machine, --> <!-- or if you want all messages to be routed through a particular mail server, --> <!-- regardless of the email addresses specified in the message --> <!-- --> <!-- The gateway element specifies the gateway SMTP server name. --> <!-- If your gateway mail server is listening on a port other than 25, --> <!-- you can set James to connect to it on that port using the gatewayPort --> <!-- element. --> <!-- Although normally multiple addresses are implemented through proper --> <!-- DNS configuration, the RemoteDelivery mail does allow specifying --> <!-- multiple gateway elements, each of which may also have a port --> <!-- e.g., mygateway:2525 --> <!-- the gatewayPort element is used as a default --> <gateway>mail.bigpond.com</gateway> <gatewayPort>25</gatewayPort> <!-- If the gateway requires smtp authentication the following directives --> <!-- (gatewayusername/gatewayPassword) can be used. --> <gatewayusername>your_username</gatewayusername> <gatewayPassword>your_password</gatewayPassword> David Moss --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
