Chile Forum

Can anyone with a telefonica connection and an email account client like outlook or thunderbird confirm that telefonica is now blocking port 25 SMTP traffic to your mail server?

In the middle of the day we lost connection to port 25. I have confirmed that it is only port 25, as other ports work to our server including an alternate port I opened up for smtp traffic works normally. I have also confirmed on 3 different ISP's in Chile that port 25 works normally. I have clients I provide mail service to, that also are on telefonica that have confirmed the same. Just out of the blue.

We just talked to telefonica and they confirmed that they are blocking it across Chile and Latin America. Like about 50% of the buisnesses in Chile just lost the ability to send email, and god only knows how many across latin america.

NO NOTICE WHAT SO EVER!!!!

Ahemm, a SEARCH reveals:

topic868-195.html#p11708

This was also confirmed by a member of the Mac user elist who phoned Telefonica directly. In typical customer service fashion, they did not warn their customers and have yet to put an update on their site (unlike VTR).

yes, magically it seems that port 25 was working again. I am sure some manager at telefonica's wife's email quit working. I can just hear the head rolling across the server room floor at Telefonica. Some knuckle head's idea of how he was going to improve service by crashing their customer service lines with complaints. BUY MORE BANDWIDTH!!!!

It is not a big deal for me. I control my mail server, so I can just open a new port. It is a big deal for all the people and companies that do not control their servers at that level, and have no clue how to configure their email clients. That was a problem for the handful of small businesses I host in Chile with telefonica connections. Trying to explain to them how to reconfigure their outlook. It was miracle that many of them managed to get their email configured in the first place. Explaining to them each how to reconfigure their email client is like talking Chinese to them.

It is also leading to my increasing distrust of telefonica. When it went down, I was nmapping my own server about 5 mins after the problem started. At some points all ports where open as normal, and a few seconds later only a few, and then none, and so on. Someone was playing with the firewall that should not have been allowed to play with it. I am afraid they are going to decide to block something critical for me out of the blue. Perhaps ssh, or IMAP, or whatever.

We run our own server in the office that coordinates with our servers in the States because we can not trust the ISP's to not do something stupid. At least we can keep working while we figure out how to route mail out of the country on our failover connection, and backups are on more than one machine in more than one country. I can just see all the isp\s getting say knocked off in Santiago, and we are left printing and mailing our email out by snail mail.

Some day I will likely shell out the cash for a Sat dish with solar panels as an insurance policy against stupidity.

They are doing it again it seems. Like this afternoon was their notice to everyone. They seem to however be doing it at the highest load times of the day. There are going to be a lot of pissed off IT support guys in the morning. Can you imagine if say you had a company branch with like 5,000 employees, and you where the only on site tech support that had to run around to each computer and reconfigure each email client?

'Difficult to believe that a company with five thousand employees would have but one techie in these days.

hypothetical, but I have seen cheap ignorant managers do things like that. What happens is normally the poor sap that got hired to get the coffee, but knows a bit about computers becomes the defacto tech guy for the office. More likely are all the little companies that can not afford an IT guy will be hurting for the rest of the week as they sort this out. Those under 25 employee type companies just got burned hard.

My ISP, Verizon, has blocked port 25 ever since I can remember, and they also limit the number of e-mails you can send in one shot to about 130. Also, if you send over 500 in one-hour period, they disable sending capabilities for 24 hours. Often times I need to send about 250 e-mails, so when they don’t go through anymore, I just reset Outlook and send the rest. All this has not been a big problem, but of course, I can no longer send anonymous e-mails (no origin IP showing), not using port 25, anyway.

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You can try to ignore reality, but reality doesn’t ignore you.

Wait a second. I am the poor sap that got hired to get the coffee, and became the defacto tech guy. Boy, I need to outsource.

No, blocking port 25 is standard practice. In fact, you really should not use port 25 for SMTP connections if it can be avoided. The problem is that a lot peoples web clients have been configured to use it for so long, trying to get everyone to reconfigure is more than a bit of problem. The biggest problem is them doing it in the middle of Monday afternoon without telling anyone.