Verizon “alternate SMTP port” mail fiasco

So, in their infinite wisdom, Verizon decided last week to just all the sudden hijack port 25 for all people on small business DSL. Yeah, seriously, they did. All week, I’ve overheard rumblings about how all the sudden all sorts of outbound mail no longer works for local verizon dsl subscribers. Coworkers, peers, everybody is just fuming mad.

I have one client, a dance studio, that literally came to a screetching halt, no outbound marketing at all. What they said to this studio, and what they eventually changed their support line to automatically say, is that ‘in order to control spam, we are no longer allowing people to use outbound mail servers on port 25.’ I called them up directly and said, what the hell are you talking about? Have you not ever read the RFC for SMTP? Do you even know what you’re asking people to do?” They said just call the ISP and tell them to run on the ‘alternate’ smtp port. I said “those are my servers, and I’m not about to cluster-@%^@^ all my clients and their already configured mail clients just because you decided to change sendmail w/o talking cern.

It was a mad scramble to re-enable this business. I literally had to bring up a second mail server just for these impacted clients, at my own cost.

Oh yeah, and they didn’t notify anybody, they just shut it down.

Keywords: verizon, nimrods, verizon idiots, alternate smtp port, smtp port 587