port blocking

[kfridge]

Hi,

I just wondered if there is anywhere on Virgins website that lists the ports that are blocked by them - I understand that this used to be available in the NTL days? (I can hear the sighs from here!)


The reason I ask is that a friend of mine has been having problems with email, the resolution was related to the fact the, according to his host, Virgin have started to block port 25 SMTP traffic - his email has been working fine up until the last few weeks though!?

[Richy99]

25 is used for sending emails so they would not block it

what error message does he get when trying to send emails?

[kfridge]

Yes I know which I why I though it strange that they would block it....

I think his problem has been resolved as I have received some emails from him - I think the problem was that he was using Virgins SMTP servers to route emails for his domain, i.e. Virgin are blocking routing emails on port 25 from anything other than their domains. Makes sense I suppose so that spammers can't route email through their servers.

[dragon]

Originally Posted by kfridge

Yes I know which I why I though it strange that they would block it....

I think his problem has been resolved as I have received some emails from him - I think the problem was that he was using Virgins SMTP servers to route emails for his domain, i.e. Virgin are blocking routing emails on port 25 from anything other than their domains. Makes sense I suppose so that spammers can't route email through their servers.

They never blocked port 25 when I used them since I used to connect to external mailservers from a VM connection all the time.

Someone on vm could try this

telnet gryphon.fbdn.net 25

Should get the following responce

Connected to gryphon.fbdn.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-gryphon.fbdn.net ESMTP Exim 4.68 #1 Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:01:53 +0000
220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited,
220 and/or bulk e-mail.

Any sane mail server admin would block emails that don't originate from accounts on their mail server from being sent.
Accepting emails for just any old other domain to be sent from your SMTP server is just asking for spammers to abuse it.

Originally Posted by dragon

They never blocked port 25 when I used them since I used to connect to external mailservers from a VM connection all the time.

Someone on vm could try this

telnet gryphon.fbdn.net 25

Should get the following responce



Any sane mail server admin would block emails that don't originate from accounts on their mail server from being sent.
Accepting emails for just any old other domain to be sent from your SMTP server is just asking for spammers to abuse it.

using that from cmd got me the same response, thanks

[Mr Smooth]

Originally Posted by kfridge

Yes I know which I why I though it strange that they would block it....

I think his problem has been resolved as I have received some emails from him - I think the problem was that he was using Virgins SMTP servers to route emails for his domain, i.e. Virgin are blocking routing emails on port 25 from anything other than their domains. Makes sense I suppose so that spammers can't route email through their servers.

I noticed for the last few days that i could not send emails from my own domain through Virgin, although I have always been able to before. My host provider also allows me to use port 225 to send out mail and this has the same result. This is NOT using virgins SMTP server, I have never used it, this is using my own hosts SMTP Servers. There is one other one I can use and that still works (thank god!). Apparently even if you try to use an alternative SMTP server, Virgins service still intercepts the emails and sends them via their servers (or not).

Makes sense though, as it reduces spam, but its a pain for people using their connection for home businesses and those who want to use their own host provider and arent allowed to. Im glad my host has a number of ports I can use.

[Jon T]

Non NTL/Virgin email still works through the NTL SMTP server here, just sent one to myself from one domain provided email addresses.