[ILUG] eircom mail

[Niall O Broin]

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 19:46, Eoin Mcloughlin wrote:

> joefitz at netsoc.ucd.ie wrote:
> > You'll only be able to send mail if you have an eircom/indigo IP
> > address or if you pop before you try to send mail (and if you're a free
> > customer this only works with Irish IP addresses). If you aretrying to
> > send from an address that isn't @eircom.net or another eircom hosted
> > domain, you'll get that domain error.
>
> Im going to have to dispute that. Ive been using mail1.eircom.net as
> smtp for all my many, many non- at eircom.net accounts without any problems.

Dispute away - you'll be wrong, although you could be forgiven. The salient 
part of Joe's missive was where he said

> > You'll only be able to send mail if you have an eircom/indigo IP
> > address or if you pop before you try to send mail (and if you're a free

which tells you that Eircom's SMTP server authenticates you based on your IP 
ADDRESS or on your having recently fetched your mail via pop - then for a 
short period of time the IP ADDRESS from which you popped is also allowed to 
use the Eircom SMTP server as a relay. Later Joe said 

> > send from an address that isn't @eircom.net or another eircom hosted
> > domain, you'll get that domain error.

and the @eircom.net bit there is confusing - he meant an IP ADDRESS which 
Eircom.net allocated and not an @eircom.net mail address.

This very issue of SMTP servers blocking / allowing access based on email 
addresses was discussed here recently. It's a terminally bad idea, because 
many people may want to use different addresses for various different 
reasons, and of course spammers regularly forge addresses so it isn't going 
to do anything to them.



Niall