The Marquis Saint Evremonde wrote:

"Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)" posted
I gave up on hotmail some time ago on virgin. It was flakey to say the least
and for some weird reason I could not enable pop3 even though it was allowed
previously.
Now I can send to and from hotmail addresses from virgin ones but my own
hotmail account never did work again. I was on one of the bt piggy backers
before.
i have just had issues with Gmail as my new hub on Virgin seems to have
made Gmail think I'm a hacker on my own account. Bah humbug.


Gmail is the worst offender in this respect IME. If the sender's SMTP
does not "match" their "From" address [using Gmail's own interpretation
of "match"], they delay the message by a variable and sometimes
unlimited time.

I suspect this is little to do with spam. Rather that they are trying to
force as many people as possible to use Gmail's own SMTP servers, so
they can collect more personal information to sell.

Back in the day, ISPs would commonly hijack port 25 SMTP traffic
and silently push it through their own SMTP server instead as an
anti-spam measure. Even though nowadays other ports are used,
is that not still the case?

--
^Ï^ My pet rock Gordon just is.