[ale] Hellsouth's wonderful email service

[Dow Hurst]

Chuck,
Maybe this will help you out:

http://www.ale.org/archive/ale/ale-2001-06/msg00391.html

See you,
Dow


Chuck Huber wrote:

>Well... The Hellsouth saga will soon be over.
>
><vent>
>I knew when I signed up for their service I'd be sorry.  And I am.
>Why'd I do it?  Well, I've been on Speed Factory forever. Upon
>relocation to the mountains of North Carolina, I found that HellSouth
>was the only company to offer DSL service in my area.  Hence, I
>chose them from a field of 1 company - what a choice.
>
>I took a while, but I learned that outbound connections to port
>25 are blocked.  Thanks HellSouth.  So I reconfigured sendmail
>to send everything through their mail server only to find out that
>relaying was not allowed from the IP address I was using. The 550
>error also stated that the solution was to connect from the
>HellSouth Internet Service.  Duh... what did they think I was using?
>
>Then there's this authentication thing.  Their stated purpose was
>"to reduce junk e-mail or 'spam' on the Internet."
>
>So... I'm now stuck not being able to send mail.  After about 30
>hours of conversations with their tech non-support, I finally was
>able to talk to a supervisor who admitted that they block port 25,
>something that, of course, was not disclosed when I signed up, and
>that they didn't allow relaying of emails through their mail server.
>To correct the problem, I would have to sign up for Business DSL, a
>prerequisite of which was a Business phone line.
>
>Granted, I'm not the Winbloze user with whom they're so accustomed
>to speaking.  I host my own domain (so mail appears to be from
>cehuber.org) and an family email list (about 30 or so users - all kin).
>
>All in all, I found that HellSouth tech-nonsupport team doesn't even
>know how to speak English.  One technician (they really shouldn't
>call themselves technicians) asked me if I wanted him to "axe" his
>supervisor to get an answer - a vernacular prevalent in the black
>community.  Another tech said "try [this] and if that don't work ...",
>yet another abuse of the language.  Not one person was knowledgeable,
>they seemed to be just following scripts - kinda like memorizing
>phonemes of lyrics to a song written in a foreign language. (I recall
>a Star Trek episode that said something like "... saying 'Juliet on
>the balcony' - without having read the play, it's meaningless."
>
></vent>
>
>Well... to end the ISP nightmare once and for all, I'm renting an
>unmanaged server somewhere up in Virginia.  It has Red Hat Fedora
>installed on it and WebMin.
>
>The problem I'm facing right now it trying to configure sendmail
>to handle virtual email domains.  On my system at home, I've been
>using linuxconf to do this quite easily.  (As bad as linuxconf is
>in other areas, it was able to handle this one function quite
>efficiently.)
>
>Well linuxconf hasn't been around since RH 8.0 (I think), and WebMin
>seems to fall short of the functionality I found in linuxconf.
>
>Can anyone give me some pointers as to how to setup virtual email
>domains with these tools?  Alternatively, I can install a different
>MTA that has such functionality.
>
>One thing I considered doing to bypass the blocked port 25 was to
>use iptables to forward outbound connections to port 25 to an outside
>host, then translate them back on the other end and forward them right
>out.  I haven't explored that to finality - just considered it.
>
>Thanks in advance to all,
>    - Chuck
>
>--
>"The purpose of encryption is to protect good people
>from bad people, not to protect bad people from the government."
>    -- Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems
>"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time
>with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
>    -- Thomas Jefferson
>"If there must be trouble let it be in my day,
>that my child may have peace."
>    -- Thomas Paine
>"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution,
>are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to
>defend them against all attacks."
>    -- Samuel Adams
>"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
>   safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
>    -- Benjamin Franklin
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