[PLUG] Dumb DNS Question? (port 25 filtering)

Charles Sliger chaz at bctonline.com
Thu Mar 2 02:34:51 UTC 2006


I'll add my own dumb question...
Is it not possible to have the laptop get the SMTP server address via DHCP
along with all the other info for the PSU environment?
Regards,
Chaz
Charles L. Sliger,    Information Systems Engineer,    chaz at bctonline.com
"no matter where you go, there you are..."

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Charlie Schluting
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 11:31 AM
To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help; civil and on-topic
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Dumb DNS Question? (port 25 filtering)

John Jordan wrote:
> 
> But there is one additional question that just occurred to me. At 
> the point where I am trying to send e-mail I am already logged in. I 
> mean, I had to log in with my student ID and password or NoCat 
> wouldn't let me in, right? So evidently I'll have to log in again? How 
> does that solve the problem with spammers, etc.?

You authenticated to nocat to get network access.
Now, any other resource you want will require authentication too.

Basically what I'm saying is that you have to comfigure your email 
client to either send via PSU (then we'd have logs saying who spammed) 
or you can use "submission" ports for non-PSU servers that mail servers 
don't accept mail on (except from it's own users). So, if spammers can't 
connect to port 25 of e.g. yahoo.com, they can't send email. This is 
harder to explain than I thought :)

So, to "fix" your problem, you how two choices:
Configure your email client to send email (SMTP server in the config) 
using port 587 with authentication. Thunderbird actually has a "TLS" 
option, which provides encryption and authentication. You'll be able to 
specify either server in the config, and it should work from both places 
(IF comcast supports this).

Or, you can configure two SMTP servers and use the comcast one when 
you're at home, the PSU one when you're at PSU.

I would suggest sending all email through PSU. (i.e. change your setup 
so that you use PSU's SMTP server, port 587, with TLS)
You can still send email "From:" whatever you want.. so your comcast 
account will still function the same. It just gets relayed through PSU 
instead of comcast. Does that make sense?
See: http://www.uss.pdx.edu/bin/article.php?article=343700
And there's more documentation about email services there too.

-Charlie
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