[lug] Getting mail out of the Qwest/MSN mire

[Daniel Webb]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 10:22:18PM -0600, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> Now, as far as relaying it through your friend's server.  I've got two
> suggestions beyond the SMTP AUTH.
> 
> One would be to use a tunnel or VPN or tunnel between your box and the
> other server.  So, your public IP may change, but you could allow the other
> server to allow relaying from your VPN/tunnel IP address.  That way you
> don't need SMTP AUTH.

I second this if you really need to use this server.  It's about the same
amount of work to setup OpenVPN the first time as it is to get SMTP AUTH
working the first time (in my experience doing both), but the VPN can then be
used for all kinds of things.  Most MTAs will have a simple option like "allow
relay from these IPs" and you just put the VPN IP block in there and you're
done.  Once you set up OpenVPN there are all kinds of neat things to do with
it, especially if you ever travel.  It's especially nice because you can
ignore security and tunneling issues, you just make sure your using the VPN
addresses and not the internet addresses.  Only downside is that it will only
work with your own computers or computer you install OpenVPN on.
 
> The other is to check to see if you can relay out through QWest's SMTP
> servers.  They probably wouldn't require SMTP AUTH on their own IP blocks,
> and that's typically what you should be doing for these sort of consumer
> connections.  This makes it much easier for QWest to put reasonable spam
> prevention measures in place on outbound mail.  This is the recommendation
> for users in "dynamic" IP blocks.

And as several people have said on this thread, this is probably the best and
easiest choice.