[n00dles]

Outgoing 25 is blocked from my site, I have to run incoming mail to a non-stanard port as it is.
I have a dynamic IP so all the pay per-use relays I've seen are no help as they auth on IP, And are rather pricy and offer extra services I just dont need.
All that togerther and the that fact I have a user base of about four people and we dont really send alot of mail.
As I see it I and a bunch of machines and I want to use them to their full ablity.

I was wondering if anyone has any advice that may shed some light on alternate options, ways round this that I may be able to look into.

Thanks

[Kernel_Killer]

Use the submission port 587. It's actually a standard that some mail servers are switching over to. Using port 25 is starting to become obsolete. ISPs will not allow port 25 unless it's within their network. Most ISP mail server will have 587 enabled for this exact reason.

[bmw]

n00dles: every ISP that blocks outbound 25 offers their own official mail relay that you are supposed to send your mail out through. Why not simply use that?

[Strog]

I've played around with a mail server on my home network. My ISP blocks outbound smtp but it was simple enough to set the server to relay through their server.

I use my gmail account to send out on my laptop. It's using the submission port instead of smtp and works regardless of which network I'm on. I'm regularly on 3 or 4 different networks a week with the laptop and this has been working great. Doesn't matter if I'm at home, work, r&d work network, coffee shop or the deli I can send out the email. I'm not too worried about email being sniffed at the coffee shop but it doesn't hurt that gmail uses TLS to secure the communications. :biggrin:

I guess it depends on whether or not you trust your ISP and/or Google to relay your email for you. Of course there's always ssh, IPSEC, openvpn, etc. to tunnel your traffic to a box you do trust to send it out. There's always the colo option but that's the most expensive solution and you'd probably already be doing that if the cost wasn't the issue. :wink:

[n00dles]

Thanks for that, its been a real help. Im still using sendmail as by default MTA as its the one i've had most expierance with, would you recomend changing to postfix? Everyone seems to rave about it.

[Kernel_Killer]

I personally like Postfix, but mainly because I'm doing a virtual setup (users, mail, domains all in MySQL). Sendmail is just fine as long as it does what you want it to. I found Postfix to be quite a bit easier to configure, but that may just be me.

[bmw]

I found Postfix to be quite a bit easier to configure, but that may just be me. No KK, pretty well anyone who has studied "the batbook" will agree with you. :-)

There are things that you can do with sendmail's .cf config files that you can't acheive with Postfix without hacking C code, but those things are rarely needed (mostly because old and bizarre legacy MTAs have mostly disappeared) and 99.999% of mail admins don't need to do them.

The bang-for-your-buck ratio favours Postfix.