Hi All,

Sorry i've been a bit quiet, I have been listening.

My wife is being driven round the bend by BT Broadband toyal yahoos or
whatever they are called this month who every so often change someting
(like the name of their outgoing mail server! Without giving any
warning to their customers, or even to their outsourced Indian sub-
continent support droids.

The cynic in me would say that this policy will make them millions
from calls to their support lines!

Anyways, I have managed to get outgoing mail going a couple of weeks
ago by making sure Eudora was using the BT Internet account to login
to the smtp server, and i've fixed it again today by spending half an
hour in a maze of twisty little passages all different which is bt
yahoo's website and "verifying" my wifes connectfree account. I did
ring Connectfree's support at one point, but was very disappointed to
find that instead of the very knowledgeable northern lad i'd gotten
last time, I got someone in the punjab who answered the phone as
Tiscali tech support :+((

Anyways, the question!

At one point the BT support droid said "well in that case, Connectfree
will have to provide you with your own smtp server" Which got me to
thinging (OK, three questions)

1. Would running our own smtp server on one of our XP workstations
protect us from any further stupidity on the part of BT.

2. Would it just work with BT's network without any configuration on
their part, or would it open up another can of worms WRT getting it
verified or whatever.

3. Would I have to get Connectfree or any other organisation to
reconfigure anything?

4. How difficult is it to set up an SMTP server?

5. If it's worth going ahead does anyone here have any recommendations
for a particular product (pref free, definately to run on XP (yes, I
know i'd be better off building a lunix box, but the management won't
allow any more boxes in the house (no, not even in the loft or the
shed))).

OK, 5 questions :+))

wrote:

At one point the BT support droid said "well in that case, Connectfree
will have to provide you with your own smtp server"

You can buy email services from someone else.

Many web hosting companies provide them with their hosting accounts but
check if an SMTP server is part of the deal. For example 1&1 have it,
123-reg don't.

http://www.authsmtp.com offers a paid for service (I've used it - it's
OK). Google also offers a free SMTP server.

Setting up your own SMTP server means that you be forever wondering
whether your domain has been blacklisted when outgoing mail hasn't been
received by the persons you are sending to. Having it on a IP connection
called 'BT broadband' is not going to help in that respect - that
service is a known dwelling of zombie trojan infected spam spewing
'family PCs'.

--
Adrian C

In article
s.com, scribeth thus
Hi All,

Sorry i've been a bit quiet, I have been listening.

My wife is being driven round the bend by BT Broadband toyal yahoos or
whatever they are called this month who every so often change someting
(like the name of their outgoing mail server! Without giving any
warning to their customers, or even to their outsourced Indian sub-
continent support droids.

The cynic in me would say that this policy will make them millions
from calls to their support lines!

OK, 5 questions :+))


Simple answer is that you do NOT have to have BT as your service
provider for your broadband service. Although the service runs over BT
wires other ISP's can provide the service.

I'd recommend Ellipse.co.uk as a good all rounder good service and a
call centre based in the UK ! Exeter actually, and part of Kingston
telecoms group the "other" phone provider.

You can also get your own domain and get your e-mail from that like

www.myname.me.uk or similar saves a lot of buggering around.

Setting up your own mail server is fraught with another can of worms.
Just change your ISP for a start, and then setup your own domain though
me.eclipse.co.uk works very well and say good riddance to the present
shower!.

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well


and just go and do it)
--
Tony Sayer

On 2008-04-12 10:46:06 +0100, said:

Hi All,

Sorry i've been a bit quiet, I have been listening.

My wife is being driven round the bend by BT Broadband toyal yahoos or
whatever they are called this month who every so often change someting
(like the name of their outgoing mail server! Without giving any
warning to their customers, or even to their outsourced Indian sub-
continent support droids.

The cynic in me would say that this policy will make them millions
from calls to their support lines!

Anyways, I have managed to get outgoing mail going a couple of weeks
ago by making sure Eudora was using the BT Internet account to login
to the smtp server, and i've fixed it again today by spending half an
hour in a maze of twisty little passages all different which is bt
yahoo's website and "verifying" my wifes connectfree account. I did
ring Connectfree's support at one point, but was very disappointed to
find that instead of the very knowledgeable northern lad i'd gotten
last time, I got someone in the punjab who answered the phone as
Tiscali tech support :+((

Anyways, the question!

At one point the BT support droid said "well in that case, Connectfree
will have to provide you with your own smtp server" Which got me to
thinging (OK, three questions)

1. Would running our own smtp server on one of our XP workstations
protect us from any further stupidity on the part of BT.

2. Would it just work with BT's network without any configuration on
their part, or would it open up another can of worms WRT getting it
verified or whatever.

3. Would I have to get Connectfree or any other organisation to
reconfigure anything?

4. How difficult is it to set up an SMTP server?

5. If it's worth going ahead does anyone here have any recommendations
for a particular product (pref free, definately to run on XP (yes, I
know i'd be better off building a lunix box, but the management won't
allow any more boxes in the house (no, not even in the loft or the
shed))).

OK, 5 questions :+))

Setting up your own SMTP server is ultimately the way of having
complete control of your mail services, but goes hand in hand with
having your own domain name as well.

However, there are some caveats.

- The ISP must allow incoming connections on TCP port 25 from any
address on the internet. They may block all incoming port 25
connections to prevent you from running your own server because they
want to control traffic or to lock you into the use of their service.

- They should allow outgoing TCP port 25 connections to any internet
address as well. That way, your SMTP server can delivr mail directly
to the SMTP servers of your addressees without going through the ISP's
server and potentially introducing unnecessary delays. It is possible
to set up your SMTP server to use theirs as an outgoing relay.

- If you are running some kind of router with NAT, you would need to
arrange either a DMZ address or a port mapping on the router such that
an incoming TCP/25 connection gets mapped to the machine running your
server. The implication of that, if you are going to run the SMTP
server on your workstation is that you are opening it up to DOS and
other attacks on port 25. If the server software that you choose has
some vulnerabilities, it may be possible for an attacker to screw up
your mail or launch an attack in some othe way compromising your
machine. Windows is not a particularly secure platform for running
network service applications, which is why many companies running
Exchange do so behind a front end Unix SMTP server rather than exposing
Exchange to the internet. XP workstation has the potential to allow
more vulnerabilities because as a nominal client side platform it is
not really intended to run services in any substantial way. In
effect you are trusting Microsoft (bad idea with anyhting involving
networking) and the quality of any SMTP server software.

- Your ISP may well be doing dynamic IP addressing. This is fairly
typical for budget connections. SMTP mail services require that if
you are running your own mail domain and server that you advertise the
address of your SMTP server in a DNS server for your domain. (search
for MX record). The original intent in the designs was that the
address should remain static for a long time. An ISP using dynamic
addressing may change it at any time although the better ones don't
unless you drop your connection. To get around this, there are
services such as DynDNS which will allow your computer or router to
update a DNS server if your IP address changes. This works reasonably
well except that it may take time for the changes to propagate to SMTP
servers wishing to send you mail. That can result in delays after
addresses change.

Provided that this connectivity is permitted by the ISP, you can run
your own server together with your own domain name. In effect, that
makes you independent of the ISP or mail and givs you easy portability
to other ISPs. A change of ISP wold only require address changes on
your side.

There certainly are SMTP servers around for XP workstation, which for
small use would probably be OK. I would select by reading reviews.
Linux is better as you say.

An alternative hosting approach would be to run virtual machines. If
you have a substantial enough machine, you could run VMware and put a
Linux virtual machine on Windows, or much better, host Windows as a VM
on Linux. This has a side advantage that you can recover your Wndows
environment very quickly when it inevitably breaks.


Having said all of this, a simpler solution to the whole issue may be
to find a mail and DNS hosting service separate from your ISP, register
a domain with it and use that for incoming and outgoing mail. Use of
this would depend on whether your ISP allows outgoing port 25
connections to servers outside their world and POP or IMAP connections
similarly. If they don't, then it's time to find another ISP.

Adrian C wrote:
wrote:

At one point the BT support droid said "well in that case, Connectfree
will have to provide you with your own smtp server"

You can buy email services from someone else.

Many web hosting companies provide them with their hosting accounts but
check if an SMTP server is part of the deal. For example 1&1 have it,
123-reg don't.

http://www.authsmtp.com offers a paid for service (I've used it - it's
OK). Google also offers a free SMTP server.

Setting up your own SMTP server means that you be forever wondering
whether your domain has been blacklisted when outgoing mail hasn't been
received by the persons you are sending to. Having it on a IP connection
called 'BT broadband' is not going to help in that respect - that
service is a known dwelling of zombie trojan infected spam spewing
'family PCs'.

Much the best idea. I can send via NTL, oops, Virgin Media or my own
hosted service. I can get mail from either (or google mail). I can
access my mail using a web interface on any of these services from
anywhere. So, if I have an internet connection I can see my mail.

--
Rod

Hypothyroidism is a seriously debilitating condition with an insidious
onset.
Although common it frequently goes undiagnosed.
www.thyromind.info www.thyroiduk.org www.altsupportthyroid.org

On 2008-04-12 11:30:21 +0100, tony sayer said:

In article
s.com, scribeth thus
Hi All,

Sorry i've been a bit quiet, I have been listening.

My wife is being driven round the bend by BT Broadband toyal yahoos or
whatever they are called this month who every so often change someting
(like the name of their outgoing mail server! Without giving any
warning to their customers, or even to their outsourced Indian sub-
continent support droids.

The cynic in me would say that this policy will make them millions
from calls to their support lines!

OK, 5 questions :+))


Simple answer is that you do NOT have to have BT as your service
provider for your broadband service. Although the service runs over BT
wires other ISP's can provide the service.

I'd recommend Ellipse.co.uk as a good all rounder good service and a
call centre based in the UK ! Exeter actually, and part of Kingston
telecoms group the "other" phone provider.

I think you mean Eclipse. I've used them in the past but migrated
because they were not able to offer link bundling. I found their
customer service respectable if one has a business account but not with
a consumer account - respponse times on the phone could be 30 mins (I
will accept 5 absolute max) and by email/tracking anything up to a week
(I will accept same day).

Nonetheless I think that they are one of the least bad providers in a
poor market.



You can also get your own domain and get your e-mail from that like

www.myname.me.uk or similar saves a lot of buggering around.

Setting up your own mail server is fraught with another can of worms.
Just change your ISP for a start, and then setup your own domain though
me.eclipse.co.uk works very well and say good riddance to the present
shower!.

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well


and just go and do it)

Eclipse does allow incoming SMTP connections if one wants it, and will
offer static addressing. AFAIK, Virgin does not offer static
addressing or allow incoming SMTP.

Both allow accesses to third party mail servers however.

On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:46:06 -0700, cpvh wrote:

snip


Anyways, the question!

At one point the BT support droid said "well in that case, Connectfree
will have to provide you with your own smtp server" Which got me to
thinging (OK, three questions)

1. Would running our own smtp server on one of our XP workstations
protect us from any further stupidity on the part of BT.

2. Would it just work with BT's network without any configuration on
their part, or would it open up another can of worms WRT getting it
verified or whatever.

3. Would I have to get Connectfree or any other organisation to
reconfigure anything?

4. How difficult is it to set up an SMTP server?

5. If it's worth going ahead does anyone here have any recommendations
for a particular product (pref free, definately to run on XP (yes, I
know i'd be better off building a lunix box, but the management won't
allow any more boxes in the house (no, not even in the loft or the
shed))).

OK, 5 questions :+))

If you run your own SMTP server, apart from getting the software and
setting it up (and there are loads of products out there including
'sendmail' itself)

(1) I am assuming that you have problems both picking up and sending mail,
as you use the same SMTP server. Therefore you want to both receive and
send mail via your own SMTP server.

(2) Therefore you will have to register your own domain name (e.g.
mydomain.forme.net) and arrange for Domain Name Service (DNS) records to
point to your IP address so that other SMTP servers know where to send the
emails destined for you. Most won't accept emails from a server without an
IP addrress which can be checked via DNS). This also means you need a
fixed IP address (or have to register with a dynamic DNS service which
will update DNS each time you get a different IP address).

(3) Once you have got your domain name and you have your SMTP server up
and running any reasonable ISP should check your SMTP server to ensure
that it is not an open relay (i.e. allows other people to use your SMTP
server to relay email including SPAM) before opening port 25 (SMTP) for
incoming traffic to your IP address.

So, although it is 'doable' you will have quite a bit of communication
with people in support roles before it is all sorted.

Alternatively (as suggested elsewhere) just get a Gmail address - you can
configure Gmail to allow you to pick up your email via POP3 and send your
email to the Gmail server via secure SMTP (although I note that I am using
my ISPs' SMTP server for my Gmail accounts). Alternatively Gmail supports
IMAP4 which again should allow you to send and receive email via the Gmail
servers and totally ignore your ISPs' servers.

HTH

Dave R

P.S. you could always load VMWare onto your PC and the pre-configured
Ubuntu image, then run your Linux SMTP server within XP. Requires a
certain amount of memory and 'grunt' to work well, though.

Simple answer is that you do NOT have to have BT as your service
provider for your broadband service. Although the service runs over BT
wires other ISP's can provide the service.

I'd recommend Ellipse.co.uk as a good all rounder good service and a
call centre based in the UK ! Exeter actually, and part of Kingston
telecoms group the "other" phone provider.

I think you mean Eclipse.

Indeed..

I've used them in the past but migrated
because they were not able to offer link bundling.

Not it might seem a problem for the OP..

I found their
customer service respectable if one has a business account but not with
a consumer account - respponse times on the phone could be 30 mins (I
will accept 5 absolute max) and by email/tracking anything up to a week
(I will accept same day).

Well we've used both and haven't noticed any difference, 'tho e-mail
support is graded by you when you make the call anyway as urgent and not
urgent etc. They did go through a bad period quite sometime ago but have
been fine since, streets ahead of BT..

However I haven't had to use support much at all as theirs been sod all
to complain about


Nonetheless I think that they are one of the least bad providers in a
poor market.


Indeed. I've been involved in a project recently where BT were involved

Incompetence squared .. nay cubed!..



You can also get your own domain and get your e-mail from that like

www.myname.me.uk or similar saves a lot of buggering around.

Setting up your own mail server is fraught with another can of worms.
Just change your ISP for a start, and then setup your own domain though
me.eclipse.co.uk works very well and say good riddance to the present
shower!.

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well


and just go and do it)

Eclipse does allow incoming SMTP connections if one wants it, and will
offer static addressing. AFAIK, Virgin does not offer static
addressing or allow incoming SMTP.

No but is that really a consideration for the O/P he just wants a
reliable mail service we use both VM where cabled and Eclipse and both
are fine)


Both allow accesses to third party mail servers however.



--
Tony Sayer

On 2008-04-12 11:47:38 +0100, David WE Roberts said:

If you run your own SMTP server, apart from getting the software and
setting it up (and there are loads of products out there including
'sendmail' itself)

A real learning opportunity there ;-)


(3) Once you have got your domain name and you have your SMTP server up
and running any reasonable ISP should check your SMTP server to ensure
that it is not an open relay (i.e. allows other people to use your SMTP
server to relay email including SPAM) before opening port 25 (SMTP) for
incoming traffic to your IP address.

So, although it is 'doable' you will have quite a bit of communication
with people in support roles before it is all sorted.

Which with a budget consumer ISP is going to be challenging if they
allow it at all..



Alternatively (as suggested elsewhere) just get a Gmail address - you can
configure Gmail to allow you to pick up your email via POP3 and send your
email to the Gmail server via secure SMTP (although I note that I am using
my ISPs' SMTP server for my Gmail accounts). Alternatively Gmail supports
IMAP4 which again should allow you to send and receive email via the Gmail
servers and totally ignore your ISPs' servers.

I have found Gmail to be reasonable, but not always reliable - e.g.
substantial delays in mail arrival sometimes. I wouldn't trust it as
my main mail service, or for that matter Yahoo or any of the others of
that ilk. A paid mail hosting service like 1&1 seems to be rather
better.



HTH

Dave R

P.S. you could always load VMWare onto your PC and the pre-configured
Ubuntu image, then run your Linux SMTP server within XP. Requires a
certain amount of memory and 'grunt' to work well, though.

Other way up works better.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not,
shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the
sand:

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and
beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

And it came to pass, when Andy had ended these sayings, the people were
astonished at his doctrine:

For he taught them as [one] having authority, and not as Microsoft.

On 2008-04-12 11:57:54 +0100, tony sayer said:

Simple answer is that you do NOT have to have BT as your service
provider for your broadband service. Although the service runs over BT
wires other ISP's can provide the service.

I'd recommend Ellipse.co.uk as a good all rounder good service and a
call centre based in the UK ! Exeter actually, and part of Kingston
telecoms group the "other" phone provider.

I think you mean Eclipse.

Indeed..

I've used them in the past but migrated
because they were not able to offer link bundling.

Not it might seem a problem for the OP..

I found their
customer service respectable if one has a business account but not with
a consumer account - respponse times on the phone could be 30 mins (I
will accept 5 absolute max) and by email/tracking anything up to a week
(I will accept same day).

Well we've used both and haven't noticed any difference, 'tho e-mail
support is graded by you when you make the call anyway as urgent and not
urgent etc. They did go through a bad period quite sometime ago but have
been fine since, streets ahead of BT..

Mmm. I agree.


However I haven't had to use support much at all as theirs been sod all
to complain about

Also true. It's just that on the very odd occasion when support is
needed, it tends to be a serious and urgent issue and then response
time is important.


No but is that really a consideration for the O/P he just wants a
reliable mail service we use both VM where cabled and Eclipse and both
are fine)

Indeed.

On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:46:06 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

Hi All,

Sorry i've been a bit quiet, I have been listening.

My wife is being driven round the bend by BT Broadband toyal yahoos or
whatever they are called this month who every so often change someting
(like the name of their outgoing mail server! Without giving any
warning to their customers, or even to their outsourced Indian sub-
continent support droids.

The cynic in me would say that this policy will make them millions
from calls to their support lines!

Anyways, I have managed to get outgoing mail going a couple of weeks
ago by making sure Eudora was using the BT Internet account to login
to the smtp server, and i've fixed it again today by spending half an
hour in a maze of twisty little passages all different which is bt
yahoo's website and "verifying" my wifes connectfree account. I did
ring Connectfree's support at one point, but was very disappointed to
find that instead of the very knowledgeable northern lad i'd gotten
last time, I got someone in the punjab who answered the phone as
Tiscali tech support :+((

Anyways, the question!

At one point the BT support droid said "well in that case, Connectfree
will have to provide you with your own smtp server" Which got me to
thinging (OK, three questions)

1. Would running our own smtp server on one of our XP workstations
protect us from any further stupidity on the part of BT.

2. Would it just work with BT's network without any configuration on
their part, or would it open up another can of worms WRT getting it
verified or whatever.

3. Would I have to get Connectfree or any other organisation to
reconfigure anything?

4. How difficult is it to set up an SMTP server?

5. If it's worth going ahead does anyone here have any recommendations
for a particular product (pref free, definately to run on XP (yes, I
know i'd be better off building a lunix box, but the management won't
allow any more boxes in the house (no, not even in the loft or the
shed))).

OK, 5 questions :+))
As others have said, get your own domain name and a seperate email
provider. I use Heart Internet
(http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/index.shtml)
good prices, great support (including telephone) and they provide POP
access, a web client (if you're away from home) and their own smtp
server for outgoing email. They also do good web hosting packages if
your interested.
David

On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:30:21 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well
I have been with them for 7-8 years but looking round at ADSL now since VM will
be intercepting your browsing and passing the information on to a third party
(Phorm - with connections to Russia and China).
And - they are currently hitting people in the Preston area with a speed
reduction (from 11am to midnight) to 1/4 after 20 minutes use - to be deployed
nationwide soon(?).


Geo

In message , Geo
writes
On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:30:21 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well
I have been with them for 7-8 years but looking round at ADSL now since VM will
be intercepting your browsing and passing the information on to a third party
(Phorm - with connections to Russia and China).

That's become less of a probability of late

Phorm are getting all kinds of **** thrown at them atm

And - they are currently hitting people in the Preston area with a speed
reduction (from 11am to midnight) to 1/4 after 20 minutes use - to be deployed
nationwide soon(?).

I thought it was dropping connection speed by 1/3 if you go over 1Gif
between 4pm and midnight

--
geoff

In article , Geo 9w0b-
scribeth thus
On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:30:21 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well
I have been with them for 7-8 years but looking round at ADSL now since VM will
be intercepting your browsing and passing the information on to a third party
(Phorm - with connections to Russia and China).

Thats hardly a tech or performance problem is it?. And it might not yet
happen..

And - they are currently hitting people in the Preston area with a speed
reduction (from 11am to midnight) to 1/4 after 20 minutes use - to be deployed
nationwide soon(?).


And your source for that is?.

They seem to be offering ever faster speeds for the same or little more
money we're to be getting 10 Meg services before long..

Unlike the ADSL variant where you have to live in the bloody exchange
for that to happen;!..

Geo

--
Tony Sayer

if you use your ISP's email package
then when you move to another ISP
you will lose your email account,
and confuse all your contacts,
so use googlemail instead
www.gmail.com
or something else free and independent of yr isp
before you're trapped

--

[george]

~

On 2008-04-13 00:28:51 +0100, "George \(dicegeorge\)"
said:

if you use your ISP's email package
then when you move to another ISP
you will lose your email account,
and confuse all your contacts,
so use googlemail instead
www.gmail.com
or something else free and independent of yr isp
before you're trapped

In principle, having email addresses separate to the ISP is a good idea
for portability reasons.

Using Google mail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, ... is less of a good idea
because many mail recipients and other email services have SPAM filters
to drop mail from anybody at these domain addresses. Some Ecommerce
sites will not accept orders from users using these mail domains.

The correct solution to assure email address portability is to register
one's own domain name and to use an email hosting service.

Google etc. email accounts are useful for the different purpose of
having disposable email addresses.

On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:52:56 +0100, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2008-04-13 00:28:51 +0100, "George \(dicegeorge\)"
said:

if you use your ISP's email package
then when you move to another ISP
you will lose your email account,
and confuse all your contacts,
so use googlemail instead
www.gmail.com
or something else free and independent of yr isp
before you're trapped

In principle, having email addresses separate to the ISP is a good idea
for portability reasons.

Using Google mail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, ... is less of a good idea
because many mail recipients and other email services have SPAM filters
to drop mail from anybody at these domain addresses. Some Ecommerce
sites will not accept orders from users using these mail domains.

The correct solution to assure email address portability is to register
one's own domain name and to use an email hosting service.

Google etc. email accounts are useful for the different purpose of
having disposable email addresses.

On the subject of portable email addresses - I still have some of my BT
Internet/ Talk21 email addresses even though I am currently on another
carrier (I knew NTL before she was a Virgin...).

I kept some originally by having a dial in PAYG account which I used once
every 6 months; they then did a deal where you pay £1.50 a month to keep
your email addresses alive. This was at the time they closed down Talk21
as a competitor to Hotmail. This seems like a good idea; I wonder if other
ISPs offer anything similar?

Strangely, I still have a working email account at '123isp' which I used
years back because they could bond two ISDN sessions together to get a
128K link, something that BT didn't offer at the time. I quit them when
Broadband became available at my local exchange but they never seem to
have cancelled my email account. I suspect a lot of small ISPs may be a
little flaky on cancelling email and web access when customers migrate.

Still, this is drifting off topic for an OT post.....

In article 4801bbd9@qaanaaq, Andy Hall scribeth
thus
On 2008-04-13 00:28:51 +0100, "George \(dicegeorge\)"
said:

if you use your ISP's email package
then when you move to another ISP
you will lose your email account,
and confuse all your contacts,
so use googlemail instead
www.gmail.com
or something else free and independent of yr isp
before you're trapped

In principle, having email addresses separate to the ISP is a good idea
for portability reasons.

Using Google mail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, ... is less of a good idea
because many mail recipients and other email services have SPAM filters
to drop mail from anybody at these domain addresses. Some Ecommerce
sites will not accept orders from users using these mail domains.


Don't bother with Hotmail and the like if you ever want to send an .exe
file as an attachment the cybernannies will block that;!..

The correct solution to assure email address portability is to register
one's own domain name and to use an email hosting service.

Indeed..


Google etc. email accounts are useful for the different purpose of
having disposable email addresses.



--
Tony Sayer

In article ,
geoff writes:
In message , Geo
writes
On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:30:21 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

Or if your areas cabled up then look at Virgin media, broadband is one
thing they do quite well
I have been with them for 7-8 years but looking round at ADSL now since VM will
be intercepting your browsing and passing the information on to a third party
(Phorm - with connections to Russia and China).

That's become less of a probability of late

Phorm are getting all kinds of **** thrown at them atm

Don't think that will make any difference.
Most residential ISPs are chosen only on price.
Competition in the residential sector has pushed the
price down below the cost of providing the service
(and this is on top of many of the ISPs now having a
leagacy of decrepid infrastructure which despirately
all needs replacing, for which they have no money).
They are basically now mostly competing to be the
worst^H^H^H^H^Hcheapest. ISPs have to find other
sources of income to finance the basic service, and
this is one of the avenues.

There will remain ISPs who decide to charge the
customer the full cost of the service in exchange for
not using Phorm and other measures to make up the
funds, but given most users choose only on price and
don't understand or don't object to Phorm, I think
you can expect it to be more common that additional
funding for the basic services will be recovered from
somewhere in order to quote lowest prices to the
masses.

If you want a service which gives you full speed all
the time and doesn't filter/shape and sell your inside
leg measurement to the chinese and has a call centre
which speaks english, you must expect to pay for it.
I do.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Andy Hall wrote:

Having said all of this, a simpler solution to the whole issue may be to
find a mail and DNS hosting service separate from your ISP, register a
domain with it and use that for incoming and outgoing mail.

For some years now I've used 'Virtual Names'
(http://www.virtualnames.co.uk/) run by UK Servers Ltd. With their
'advanced forwarding account' you get up to 10 POP3 mailboxes, with good
configurable spam filtering, webmail access and an SMTP relay for
£10(+VAT) per year. Domains and DNS hosting (& DNS zone control panel)
are also very cheap. Despite the low cost it's a first class service,
reliable and fast. Highly recommended - and I've no connection with
them except as a satisfied customer.

this would depend on whether your ISP allows outgoing port 25
connections to servers outside their world and POP or IMAP connections
similarly. If they don't, then it's time to find another ISP.

Although many mail providers, including the above, accept SMTP
connections on port 225 to get round that problem.

--
Andy