I have a horrid suspicion...

[Barnabo, Chris]

On Thu, 03 Aug 2000 23:02:39 +0100, David Gaskill wrote:

>My main ISP, through whom I am sending this posting, has just 
>changed the configuration of his servers so that when I dial in 
>through another ISP I can no longer use his SMTP server unless I 
>use an authorisation procedure. 

My look through the PMMail98 account properties has me inclined to agree 
with you, but perhaps some guru can confirm/deny for certain.

Many ISP's restrict access to their SMTP servers to folks on their own 
network or folks who authenticate to them so that they can prevent 
undesirable folks from using their servers to originate spam.  

I was in a similar situation - used one ISP for mail, but a different 
ISP when travelling (cable co. didn't offer dial-up at that time).  My 
solution was the following:

1.  Find out the numeric IP addresses for the main ISP's SMTP server and 
the roaming ISP's SMTP server.  Code them both into the HOSTS. file for 
safekeeping.  Code a third entry called "SMTPMAIL" with the numeric 
address of the current active server.

2.  Change all mail programs (PMMail, web browser, etc.) to use SMTPMAIL 
as the outgoing server name.

3.  When travelling, switch server addresses in HOSTS.  Takes effect 
immediately.  When back home, switch it back.  With some trivial effort 
you can code a program to do it for you from a menu shortcut or maybe 
automate it based on other things (are there drive letters that only 
show up when you're home & docked, for instance?)

I don't need to do this anymore, though ... my web hosting provider 
(which also handles my e-mail) has added SMTP capability, so I can 
always use that server and forget the changes.  *Their* catch is that 
you must authenticate to the POP server before you can access the SMTP 
server, and the POP authentication only enables you for about a 15 
minute window - that's how they ensure that only authorized people 
access the server, without breaking mail programs like PMMail.  This was 
easy to setup as well - I configured PMMail not to queued messages on 
startup, but do send after every fetch & immediately when mail is 
written, and autofetches occur at startup and at 10 minute intervals.  
It's been running without a hitch for months.

If you're interested in that solution, you can check out 
http://www.valueweb.net, in addition to web-hosting they have an e-mail 
only offering, and since you'll have your own domain name and fixed mail 
server names/addresses you can configure once for the rest of your life 
and completely insulate yourself from troublesome ISP changes.

 
-- Chris
              ________*________ Chris Barnabo, chris@spagnet.com
____________  \_______________/ www.spagnet.com
\__________/      / /
     __\ \_______/ /__         "The heck with the Prime Directive,
     \_______________/(-        let's destroy something!"