Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Let me try again... when you send email by any method using any relay server you hired, because it belongs to your isp, that email can be traced back to you regardless of your from address, and regardless of the method you used to authenticate yourself to the isp or smtp server - provided everything is correctly configured at their end.
This relay server will normally send all that email direct to the destination address, no intermediaries. The destination server can not do authentification, because the email is for him: he can not reject it, unless he thinks it is spam or virus or such. AAAAHHHH Right, my thick headedness has cleared considerably! :) I thought there were intermediaries as if a link to a country goes down then the packet would need to be routed to on another path via an intermediary host.
I thought the intermediary and destination server did authentication to cut back on SPAM.
OK, what I have managed to so far partly confirm is that my ISP is currently doing authentication on email the SMTP server receives from the ISPs users and thus they are prohibiting me from sending email from my own domain that is not held/registered by them, eventhough I hold a dialup and different email account with them.
If you don't know what kind of restriction have been placed on the mailserver of your provider it is normally the easiest way to simply ask the provider what restrictions have been set. Of course, the person you are getting on the other end of the line might not be much wiser than you (happened to me). The other method is to simply test it. Usually, when you try to send an email and the mailserver is refusing to accept the mail you get a reject code and error message. Normally this is enough to understand why the server refused the message. Postfix can of course use authentication when sending mails to the relayserver. It depends on the receiving relayhost if it is configured to only allow the sender address that you used to authenticate with to the relayserver. Most relayservers are configured to require authentication when you want the relayserver to accept a message and have it relayed to the internet. Again, the error message should appear either when sending in mozilla or in the log of your local mailserver when you try to send a mail to the relayserver. Sandy -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com