SMPT Relay

[Connie]

I had my first e-mail bounce today because:
Client host rejected: Not accepted - reason AA. use your isp's smtp relay. problems? email "abuse".

The e-mail was a reply to a question a potential customer asked. The days of using Jag to send e-mail may be coming to an end.

[Connie]

I just tried to resend the message using the CP (SquirrelMail). The e-mail was rejected again.

[Oldfrog]

Interesting, Connie. I have not seen any problems at all with any of my automated responses nor with the personal accounts that I use through my domain.

[Connie]

Today is the first time I have had a problem in regard to smpt. I finally set Eudora up to include the smpt header to send through Earthlink. I resent the e-mail. No bounces. But this could become a pain in the but. I use 2 different ISPs to connect to the Internet. I don't want to have to have different accounts to send from.

This is the first time this has happened for me. I know the smpt protocol was put into use months ago. Until today it has not been a problem. It may not be a big problem but I think it could be.

What I don't understand. When sending e-mail direct from the CP why the proper smpt information is not included in the header. I understand why it is not when sending from an e-mail client.

[Oldfrog]

I must be missing something here, Connie. What "proper information" is not being included in the header?

[jason]

Connie,

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transport Protocol. It is the basic mechanism for getting a message from one server to another (or in your case, from mail client to server), and its been around since the early days of email. It is nothing new.

Long ago (in Internet time, i.e. a few years ago) most SMTP servers allowed relaying. That is, one server could open a connection to another server give it a "bundle" of mail, and the receiving server would do all the work of sending it. With the proliferation of spam in recent years, most server admins have turned this feature off. Now in many cases a server that has an open relay is seen as a spam bot. In fact being an open relay is usually grounds for instant instant inclusion on many of the blacklists.

JPC's servers require you to log in with valid account credentials to send mail and are therefore not open relays--or at least they shouldn't be. You might want to contact support and make sure that your server running correctly. It could just be that sender's server is acting flaky, but it could be a problem with your server. If it is allowing anonymous connections right now, it is only a matter of time before the blacklists will catch it and then you won't be able to send mail to many people at all, so this is something important that support should know about.

--Jason

[gerilya]

Connie,

Just wondering, that customer of yours, does he/she has RoadRunner's e-mail?

[Connie]

Jason, the smpt protocol that I am referring to is fairly new. There was a lot of discussion about it several months ago. It affects the header of your e-mail. Most ISPs have adopted this. If you don't have it in the header you can't send e-mail from them. On the other hand other ISPs look for this to see if your e-mail might be Spam.

I haven't sent e-mail through an ISP (in this case Earthlink) for a couple of years. I have by passed their block on port 25 to use my account on Jag.

When the e-mail bounced (which was a reply) to a question from a perspective customer it bounce because it did not have the right smpt information in the header as far as I can tell.

Earthlink had sent an e-mail about this months ago. Took me about an hour to find the correct information on their site but I had to change some of my settings in an e-mail client to be able to send through them. In fact what I changed was mail.earthlink.net to smpt.earhlink.net. On the third attempt using Earthlink the mail went through.

After hearing back from the person involved today, I think right now this is a unique problem. He works for a large law firm. They are getting tons of spam and are experimenting with ways to cut down on the spam.

I meant to get some more information from Earthlink about this today but did not have time. Jason, I am surprised you don't remember this issue. There was quite a bit of discussion about it here several months ago and how it might affect those of us using Jag to send e-mail through rather than our ISP.

I will try to find time tomorrow to get some more information which will hopefully explain this a little better.

[Ron]

You might want to consider spelling it SMTP.earthlink.net not SMPT

But then, what the heck do I know.

[gerilya]

Connie,

I have to admit I didn't get your explanation.
You say the mail bounced from your client's server and then talk about some mails Earthlink (your provider, right?) sent months ago.
As long as your client doesn't use Earthlink what does it have to do with the mail sent via Jag's server?

[Connie]

Sorry to be so slow in responding and appreciate all the comments. I was probably not clear but here is what I was referring to:

"ASMTP" stands for "Authenticated SMTP". It is the name of the protocol that standard messaging servers should provide in order to prevent spammers from using servers to relay messages on their behalf.

Now this is the reason the e-mail was rejected which was part of the initial post.

Client host rejected: Not accepted - reason AA. use your ISPs smtp relay. problems? email "abuse".

I have never seen an e-mail rejected for the above reason. The e-mail in question was sent using port 465 because both of my ISPs block port 25 so I prefer to send e-mail through Jag.

My understanding of the fairly new ASMTP authentication, You can't send without it, and ISPs on the receiving end look to see if its there as part of their incoming Spam filters.

By the way I don't type well, so I may at anytime mix the correct initials or even numbers.

I still believe there was a thread about this several months ago and the potential problems it could have for any one sending through port 465 to bi pass theirs ISPs block on port 25.

[Connie]

Let me add that I tried to resend the message direct from CP. I got an identical reject message. So Jag is not using the new ASMTP authentication. I understand why they can't when we send through port 465, but why can't they when sending from CP?

As soon as I tracked the correct information down with Earthlink and set a email client up for the new Earthling settings, I sent an email to the same person with no problems.

[jason]

Connie,

I think you are confusing two different things. With such a proliferation of spam lately there are lots of new things coming out to prevent it and it is difficult to keep them all straight.

Authenticated SMTP is nothing new. Actually, Jag has been using it since I've been hosting here. It simply refers to the need to send a username and password to the server in order to send mail through it. This doesn't effect the message you send in any way, AFAICT. In some anti-spam solutions the receiving server makes a check back to the sending server to see if it asks for a login. If the server doesn't respond as expected it fails, and I expect this is what happened here. As you said, the company was experimenting at the time, so they probably dodn't have everything working quite right at the time.

The issue that caused the buzz a few months ago was Sender Policy Framework, another antispam measure that Microsoft adopted. With SPF a special record is published in a site's DNS identifying each server that is allowed to send mail originating from that domain. A receiving SMTP server would then look at where a message originated and check the sender's DNS record for an SPF record from that domain. If your customer's server was blocking solely on SPF then switching to Earthlink wouldn't work for you since Earthlink's server wouldn't be published in your siste's DNS.

As you said, they were experimenting with different anti-spam solutions and probably just had things locked down a little too tight when your message was received. It probably isn't too serious, although I could see "flukes" like this happening more often as new anti-spam measures are develped and tested.

--Jason

[Connie]

I think you are confusing two different things. With such a proliferation of spam lately there are lots of new things coming out to prevent it and it is difficult to keep them all straight.

Wouldn't be the first time.

I under stand this is used primarily between me and the mail server to authenticate that I have the right to send mail through that server. (laymens explanation). Doesn't it also insert a unique identifier into the header so the recipient mail server could use that to determine if e-mail might be spam?

I just checked my mail settings for Jag servers and I don't have SMPT Authentication checked. But I have no problems sending through their servers.

When getting my e-mail client set up to send through Earthlink the other night I had to check Authentication before it would work.

[gerilya]

Wouldn't be the first time.

I under stand this is used primarily between me and the mail server to authenticate that I have the right to send mail through that server. (laymens explanation). Doesn't it also insert a unique identifier into the header so the recipient mail server could use that to determine if e-mail might be spam?

I just checked my mail settings for Jag servers and I don't have SMPT Authentication checked. But I have no problems sending through their servers.

When getting my e-mail client set up to send through Earthlink the other night I had to check Authentication before it would work.

There are 2 main methods for authentication: SMTP Authentication you mentioned and (an older) POP before SMTP. The later allows sending mails after authentication by the POP3 service.
What it means is that if you try sending mails via Jag server w/o downloading the mails first and you dont have SMTP AUTH checked, your mail will be rejected.
A mail server might or might not include information such as user name used with SMTP AUTH method into mail header, but relying on this information would be very bad idea: it would filter out legit mail sent via POPB4SMTP method, but couldn't recognise faked headers any serious spamer would add in no time.