On the show yesterday, we had a question about being able to send mail from the iPhone. There have been reports of folks who can retrieve their mail just fine, but cannot always send it.
As it turns out, this is a similar problem that laptop users have when they travel around. To reduce the amount of spam that gets sent through their networks, your mail provider or your internet service provider (or both if they’re different) probably have restrictions on how and when they’ll accept mail from you to be delivered to someone else.
In this article, we’ll talk about what’s happening here and what you can do to work around this.
The Source of the Problem
The problem all stems from spam. In the good old days of the internet, everyone trusted everyone else. After all, it was just university researchers and some high level government people that had access to computers. There were no restrictions on the sending of e-mail. There were no passwords required to send mail, and you could hand your message to any server and it would take care of getting it to the right place for you.
As the internet and computer usage grew, the unscrupulous among us decided to take advantage of that trust and the lax restrictions. They started using other people’s mail systems to send out their junk messages. So Mr. Spammer would hand a single message with 1,000 or more recipients listed on it to someone else’s mail server, and it had to do all the heavy lifting of sending that letter to the 1,000 recipients. (This abused server is now called an “open relay”.)
Restricted Mail Sending
ISPs had no choice but to start restricting the mail that they would forward. The standard restriction was that they would only accept mail if it was intended for one of their customers. So the “joerhodes.com” mail system won’t accept or forward mail for anyone other than a Joe Rhodes account holder. Most all mail providers now lock their systems down, and the ones that don’t are quickly put on “black lists” and most systems won’t accept any traffic from a mail server on that list.
But joerhodes.com account holders send mail to more folks than just other joerhodes.com people. There had to be some exception to this rule. In most cases, the mail provider allowed other mail to be sent if that mail was generated on their own network. So a joerhodes.com account holder, using a Joe Rhodes internet connection could use the Joe Rhodes mail system to send mail to a Google.com account. Another way to facilitate this is to make the joerhodes.com user provide a valid username and password before the mail server would forward the message.
Well, there’s big money in spam, and some really clever people too. With the number of open relays dropping dramatically, and the remaining ones becoming less useful, they devised plan B.
Bot-Nets
What they do now is infect unsuspecting computers with a virus of some type. Unlike old viruses that would immediately hurt you, these viruses sit silently in the back ground. Occasionally they get instructions from the person that installed the virus, and then this virus starts acting like an open relay described above. Mr. Spammer sends someone’s home PC an e-mail asking it forward it to 1,000 other addresses using that poor user’s internet connection. When you get a few thousand of these infected PC’s, you get quite an army of spam-spewing machines. These are sometimes called “Bot Nets”. And the folks that own the infected PC don’t really notice other than it’s really slow.
Port Blocking and Authenticated Relaying
Presented with this new problem, internet service providers took action. They’re not too happy about having their networks abused like this, so they blocked the standard method (called “port 25″) of sending mail to any machine unless it was going through their own mail server. Generally, their mail servers were better managed and monitored, so they could more easily see if someone was abusing it. This is sometimes referred to as “port 25 blocking”.
This creates a problem for the mobile user, either iPhone or laptop. Now, even if they had a proper user name and password for the joerhodes.com mail server, if they’re on a Charter internet connection, Charter will not let them talk to the joerhodes.com mail server to send mail. (Again, this has nothing to do with receiving mail, just sending.) The only mail server you could use (assuming you use the standard port 25) would be Charter’s. Ouch! If you’re in a coffee shop or a friends house, it’s difficult if not impossible to figure out just what mail sever you should use. That left many mobile users in the spot of, “I can get email but I cannot send any.”
Some ISPs figured this would be a problem and devised a special port (think of a port as a door in a wall) for just this purpose. Since it’s not the standard that everyone’s come to count on, they could define additional security precautions that would not be viable otherwise. In practice, this means that for any mail to pass through this alternate port at all, you must provide a user name and password first. Typically, the alternate mail ports are port 587 or port 465.
Typical Madison ISP Mail Configurations
Each mail provider has to set this up. Here are a few that have made special allowances for the laptop/mobile user:
- Charter Internet: None that I can find
- TDS: None that I can find
- AT&T / SBC / Yahoo!
- Apple’s .Mac Service
So if you use one the services that is set up for this, you can send out mail using that service with your username and password. Note that it (generally) doesn’t matter what the e-mail account you are sending from is. For example, you can use the AT&T outgoing mail server (provided you are an AT&T customer with a valid user name and password) to send mail, even if the “from” line says “someone@tds.net” or “charter.com”, etc. Better still, you’ll be able to do this from nearly any internet connection, whether that’s Charters, TDS, or AT&T via the iPhone.
To find out exactly how to set up your e-mail outgoing mail account, you’ll have to contact your mail provider. Often times, they’ll have this data on their web site. If your ISP doesn’t offer this service, you can use Apple’s .Mac system to send mail, even if you don’t want to use it for receiving mail. (Much like a post office, it doesn’t matter what mail box you drop your letter into, as long as you have the correct address and return address on it.)
It’s a lot to think about, and sometimes wading through pages and pages of help documentation or sitting on hold is unpleasant, but once you’ve done it, it will make your mobile mail life much easier.
