Freeserve Mail.app and SMTP

I’ve been having problems with sending mail when in a certain location. I’ve just figured out why - The ISP that is used there is Freeserve and they force all traffic on port 25 (SMTP - Outbound Mail) through their own mail servers.

This, to me, is very irritating - all my mail accounts use authenticated SMTP servers outside Freeserve. When I try to send a message my mail client (Mail.app) quite reasonably tries to connect to smtp.mac.com - and as far as it is concerned has done - it gets back an SMTP server response, but not from the server it asked for!

Widebook:~ diggory$ telnet smtp.mac.com 25
Trying 17.250.248.48…
Connected to smtp.mac.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 tmailb1.svr.pol.co.uk ESMTP Exim 4.14 Sun, 14 Dec 2003 16:50:47 +0000
EHLO
250-tmailb1.svr.pol.co.uk Hello modem-249.arbok.dialup.pol.co.uk [217.135.16.249]
250-SIZE 104857600
250-PIPELINING
250 HELP
QUIT
221 tmailb1.svr.pol.co.uk closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

This leads to problems - Mail tries to authenticate itself to the SMTP server, as is required for the server that it is expecting - but whoops! Freeserve’s SMTP servers don’t support Authentication so the whole operation goes tits-up.

Grrr… I’ve managed to hack around it by using a new bogus mail account that uses freeserve’s unauthenticated server - but I’ll still get one error every time I try to send email from there.

Mucking around with the way my IP traffic works is not a good way to endear me as a customer to an ISP.

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