Re: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?

[Adrian Chadd <adrian () creative net au>]

[reposting this to nanog, as my answer might be reasonably ontopic]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2005, Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 8:05 AM +0000 2005-02-25, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>
> > >    Because your MUA doesn't support SSL on what it considers to be
> > > non-standard ports?  Because your ISP won't let you set up an ssh
> > > tunnel instead?  Because there would be no other way to keep your
> > > mail connection secure, if SSL and ssh are denied to you?
> >
> > Which MUA, that you/your users are using, won't let you run SSL on port 
> > 587?
>
>       Apparently, many Microsoft MUAs don't support that kind of thing.

Thats strange. I'm sure I've had outlook 200x speak SSL on 587.
I've only ever had issues with Outlook parsing unsigned SSL certificates -
it'll complain, then randomly crash.

>       Other MUAs don't support SSL at all, and therefore if you want to 
> secure their communications, they either have to be tunneled over 
> ssh, or you have to use a VPN.

Well, thats a bit silly then. There's SSL wrappers to use to "fake"
SSL but you shouldn't have to.

Rightio. It may be the case that its less of an MTA configuration issue
and more of an MUA issue. Adoption rates may be higher if popular MUAs
supported AUTH SMTP/SSL over port 587.



Adrian

-- 
Adrian Chadd                    "You don't have a TV? Then what's
<adrian () creative net au>         all your furniture pointing at?"