Careful Cory, you may have to be the middle man for all Boing Boing readers and AT&T technical issues if this works…
I think the feds, excuse me, AT&T have their own nefarious reasons for distrusting boing boing. It might be that truth is dangerous. It might be that money is nice. Who can fathom the depths of stupidity?
RTFM, it’s a server setting on your end:
“AT&T’s email transfer policies, as detailed in section 23, paragraph 4 of the NSA’s guide to network operations requires the use of weak encryption…”
Just switch it to ROT13 and you’ll be fine.
You can also post to the NANOG lists, or ask in #cisco on Freenode.net IRC. Those have been my go-tos when I’ve needed to get ahold of technical folks at $bigcorp.
Good luck.
Comcast told me to pound sand years ago. I switched to FIOS, but they block port 25 incoming too.
There’s no excuse for it other than massive incompetence at the ISP. They honestly (no, honestly, and that’s a word I don’t generally use in this context) believe they are doing something that will somehow have a positive effect on spamming. Because they are incompetent.
AT&T Network Operations? Cory, here’s their number: 301-688-6524
Don’t ask me how. but I can confirm this to be true.
Seen! Â
Embarqmail too. What a bunch of dimwits.
Who uses port 25? 587 is where it’s at, baby!
You don’t run your own mail server?
I was recently told, by an AT&T customer service representative, that there was no way I could directly contact their service office in Santa Rosa because that office had no phone service.
That may be an intention. When the volume of calls becomes a problem, one of possible approaches is to change mode of communication.
The lack of phone services may be a feature, not a bug. From their perspective, at least.
[quote=“shaddack, post:15, topic:72225, full:true”]
That may be an intention. When the volume of calls becomes a problem, one of possible approaches is to change mode of communication.[/quote]
Well, it was certainly their intention that I not phone the local service depot. However, the idea that the office of a venerable phone company in a major city would have no phones was an obvious lie.
All I wanted to do was drive over and swap a defective dsl modem for a working one. They kept scheduling service calls then not showing up. The correct solution - as it turned out - was for me to flag down an AT&T service van in the neighborhood, and get the technician driving it to swing by; he had spare equipment in the truck. He also gave me his cell for future issues. I would have written a letter to his office commending him, but I was afraid they would sack him for violating company policy.
Call/message him, ask him if it is a good idea to do it.
Not from my home, although I probably could if I for some reason wanted to. My ISP is pretty hands-off about that sort of thing.
That technician is a fucking saint.
Or maybe I’m biased. Because all of the technicians we request at my work for network stuff end up being inside wiring electricians. Guys who can do all kinds of things but often don’t understand that it’s absolutely vital that they don’t run CAT5 alongside a 220v line crossing it several times.
My dad’s an electrician, but I don’t think I’d trust him to wire up the house for data.
Everybody! It’s what MTAs (mailservers) use to transfer mail to each other. I don’t want to run my email through an ISP’s spam and malware riddled MTA when my own mailserver has a literally perfect record of never sending anything of the sort. Email is significantly reputation-driven, at the technology layer, so it literally devalues my email to send it through their sordid ghettos. I’m more RFC-compliant than they are, too, and I implemented STARTTLS years before they even knew what it was.
It’s the only way to go for MUA (mail user agent) email submission to MTAs over an untrusted network! I even use it on my trusted network, because I don’t trust trusted networks 
