On 02 November 2001, Robert Rotman said:
> Why do you send all your mail to another mailserver (isp)
> isnt adsl a permanent connection to the internet?
There are a variety of reasons to do this:
* ADSL and cable modem machines are typically home PCs, so
not up 24/7
* also they typically don't have professional sysadmins to make
sure the mail queue is functioning properly
...but that just explains why ISPs make smarthosts available. If you
*are* running a DSL/cable modem machine, why would you want to use the
ISP's mail relay? One word: DUL.
(One of the MAPS blacklists is a list of dynamically-allocated ISP IP
addresses; the theory is that spammers are more likely to get a cheap
dialup (or, nowadays, DSL/cable modem) account and connect directly to
their target machines, rather than going through their ISP's relay.
Presumably ISP relays are setup to detect massive amounts of mail from a
single client and set off spam-bells. Thus, in theory, only spammers
need to connect directly from a dial-up/DSL/cable modem to a remote SMTP
server.)
Having said all that, I should point out that:
* I use my ISP's smarthost for most outgoing mail, because I
don't want to have to worry about a mail queue when I shut
my machine down
* I'm still glad I'm running a real MTA (Exim, of course) on
my home machine, because there have been several outages
where Exim happily queued mail for me.
Greg
--
Greg Ward - software developer gward@???
MEMS Exchange http://www.mems-exchange.org
