North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?

  • From: Joe Maimon
  • Date: Wed Feb 16 08:45:49 2005 


Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 09:00:11PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:

Sendmail now includes Port 587, although some people disagree how
its done. But Exchange and other mail servers are still difficult
for system administrators to configure Port 587 (if it doesn't say
click here for Port 587 during the Windows installer, its too
complicated).

This is utterly silly. Running another full-access copy of the MTA
on a different port than 25 achieves precisely nothing

I think we have ignored/trivialized the obvious.

Port 587 gives you the ability to class your connections as either MTA<->MTA, Legacy User->MTA, MSP User ->MTA.

This is quite valuable as you now have the theoretical ability treat them differently. Whether that means different access/authentication/encryption/firewall/relay policies or whatever.

If all one does is run a full copy on that port then *THEY* have gained almost nothing in practice, aside from further un-exploited capabilities. However we all gain from ever increasing, even if it is only incremental, support of well known RFC's.

Specific MTA discussions aside, port 587 is a good thing, and the more of it the merrier.