Outgoing SMTP Servers

[blake at ispn.net (Blake Hudson)]

I didn't see anyone address this from the service provider abuse 
department perspective. I think larger ISP's got sick and tired of 
dealing with abuse reports or having their IP space blocked because of 
their own (infected) residential users sending out spam. The solution 
for them was to block the spam. The cheapest/easiest way to do this was 
to block TCP 25 between subs and the internet, thus starting a trend. If 
587 becomes popular, spammers will move on and the same ISPs that 
blocked 25 will follow suit.

A better solution would have been to prevent infection or remove 
infected machines from the network(strong abuse policies, monitoring, 
give out free antivirus software, etc). Unfortunately, several major 
players (ATT, for example) went down the road of limiting internet 
access. Now that they've had a taste, some of them feel they can block 
other ports or applications like p2p (Comcast), Netflix (usage based 
billing on Bell, ATT, others).

Unfortunately, I don't see the trend reversing. I'm afraid that Internet 
freedoms are likely to continue to decline and an "Unlimited" Internet 
experience won't exist at the residential level in 5+ years.

--Blake