I thought I had posted this before, but I guess not. SBC is evil and blocked port 25, I thought most everyone would have found out about this by now but I guess not. I keep getting calls and sometimes an email from people who’s outlook or thunderbird or (insert other email program here) client doesnt work. Everytime they are on an SBC DSL line, and SBC has “filtered” (or blocked basically) access to mail servers that are not theirs. There are basically 3 ways to get around this:
- You can petition them to opt out of the port 25 (SMTP) block (I’ve done it — it takes less than 24 hours and you’ll 99% of the time get what you want). You can do that on SBC’s Abuse Form.
- You can use SBC’s SMTP servers — Which is not a good idea — but the instructions are on SBC’s site
- Contact your email host for an alternate SMTP port (many do) and reconfigure you mail client to use that alternate port. (This is handy to do in case you go somewhere else besides home that blocks port 25 (aka SMTP)).