Hello Fred,

On Monday March 27 2017 09:07, you wrote to All:

 FR> There should be discussion regarding non-standard ports for email
 FR> tunneling since many ISPs block the standard port, and it is not
 FR> unheard of for fido nodes to run their own email servers.

Yes, there are Fidonet sysop who run their own e-mail server. But none that I
know of run them on a non standard port. IMHO runnning an e-mail server on any
port other than 25 is useless. The e-mail system simply does not provide for
using a port other than 25 for connecting to a server without prior
arrangement. If you have the misfortune that your ISP blocks port 25 on
incoming, your are out of luck. For outgoing one can often use the ISPs e-mail
server as a relay, but an incoming blocked port 25 is a show stopper.

But... If you think there is way to circumvent a blocked port 25 in a way
usable in Fidonet, write a proposal and if/when it becomes common practise, the
FTSC will document it.

As a personal note, I would like to say, that I never liked using e-mail as a
transport medium for Fidonet. At one time it may have been a good idea as there
was nothing else other than POTS, but a serious problem with e-mail is that
there is no direct feedback about the status of the mail. You never know if it
arrived on the system of the addressee if there is no reply. It is similar to
routed mail.

Also when I still ran Irex, I experimented with it. I found that listing an
e-mail address in the nodelist is a bad idea. I ran the experiment for over a
year and I did not get a single legitimate Fdionet message via e-mail other
than the few I sent from my own point system for testing. It did attact a lot
of spam though.


 FR> Additions/Changes are marked with ">" in column 1.

OK...


Cheers, Michiel

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