SBC makes DSL, er, exciting

Backspin By Mark Gibbs, Network World
March 21, 2005 12:08 AM ET

. What's this?

As some of you might remember from previous columns, I have been involved in getting my son's school online and computerized. A few weeks ago the school called me because their e-mail services had suddenly stopped working: Although they could receive e-mail, no one could send anything.

We'd had some previous problems with the server but a simple restart fixed them. No luck this time around. I tried sending and receiving e-mail from the server and it appeared that the POP3 service was running, but the SMTP service wouldn't respond. To this day, I do not know why it failed.

If it hadn't, this story would be a lot shorter.

So I e-mailed the server's owner and he restarted it, and e-mail then appeared to work. I told the school the next day and they called me back minutes later to say that nope, still didn't work for them.

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Now at this point I was pushed for time so I e-mailed the server's owner again and got him to refer the problem to his support people. Two days later (which was just over a week into the school not having e-mail) I chased it down and found out that he'd never heard back from support.

Because of this and a couple of other problems we'd had with the server, all of which seemed to be caused by the server being somewhat antique (a Cobalt RAQ), I decided to move the school's Web site and e-mail to another server.

The school's principal told me that another parent had offered his server so I worked with him and a few days later the new accounts were set up. But as far as the school was concerned the e-mail system was still dead in the water.

My story solved

Well, to make a long IT story (is there any other kind?) short, I went back to the school and started trying to figure out what was going on. A bit of poking around revealed that no servers on the Internet could be contacted on Port 25, the port used for SMTP. Obviously, Port 25 was being blocked . . . but why?

No, surely not . . . but there it was: A Google search revealed that SBC, the school's DSL provider, had decided, in its wisdom, to stem the flow of spam by blocking SMTP! Turns out that SBC rolled out this ridiculous and ineffective program sometime late last year but only for accounts using dynamic IP addresses. As I have a static address Port 25 blocking hadn't affected me. To find out about the blocking you had to be psychic or read the notice sent to the SBC e-mail account the company provides when you install your DSL line.

But if you use some other e-mail service all you'll find in the SBC account are SBC marketing messages, so I suspect most people ignore it. Even better, it turns out that the school's account isn't accessible any longer for reasons that I have yet to determine.

To unblock Port 25 you have to go to SBC's "Abuse of Service" Web page and request to be unblocked using a poorly designed form. A couple of hours later, and after roughly three weeks of being disconnected, the school was sending and receiving e-mail.

This has to be one of the most ill-conceived anti-spam tactics I've come across. SBC seems to have hardly thought through the issues. Did it send out a notice with its service invoice? Not that I saw. Did it check whether DSL customers actually use their accounts or that the accounts even work? Apparently not.