Is your ISP blocking outgoing port 25?

[johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine)]

> The bootstrap question is addressed by requiring the end-user to know their
> e-mail address and password.  Based on the domain name, the implementation
> would reach out to https://something.domain-name.tld and download the
> relevant "schema" and data for IMAP, SMTP, POP3, etc, in ordered priority.
> Based on what the e-mail client could support, the desired settings would be
> displayed, and upon end-user approval, applied.

End-user approval?  That means support calls, ISPs wouldn't like that.

I can believe something like this could be made to work, but I would think 
hard about all the way that web sessions can get screwed up or hijacked 
before I persuaded myself that a scheme was likely to work where it needed 
to work (e.g., when connecting to a hotspot that hijacks all web sessions 
until you log in) while not being subject to hostile spoofing.

Followups definitely to IETF-something.

R's,
John