Adino Online

If you haven’t heard the news about this, TM has blocked all traffic on Port 25 in its Streamyx network. Port 25 is the port that is used by servers to send email out.

This means that any email server that is using the Streamyx internet connection will not be able to send out any email using port 25 any more. This will mainly affect companies, web domain owners with Malaysian web hosting companies, and people with personal web servers at home.

The solution offered by TM is to allow mail servers to send mail through an open relay server. That means you send mail to TM’s server, and they will forward your mail for you.

Web mail like Gmail, Yahoo and Windows Live Mail are not affected.

What does this mean to you?

1. Privacy of emails is compromised. If you didn’t know, emails do hop around from server to server on its way to your recipient so the risk of someone intercepting your email has always been there.The issue is you emails now make a stop to TM’s server. Which makes it very convenient for any censorship or snooping don’t you think? And I can’t imagine TM staff being very good with their security practices.
2. If this move was to stop spammers, won’t spammers use this relay as well, and we will end up at square one? Any competent spammer would just switch ports anyway.
3. Wasting time for support and reconfiguration if you are a network administrator. Especially with the last minute announcement / mandate.
4. Webmasters like me who have their domain hosted locally also kena. I got an email from ExaBytes to instruct me to change my email program to use port 26.

Quote from the Terror-Man website, quotes added by me:

Telekom Malaysia Berhad wishes to inform its customers about TM’s initiative in combating spam in its Internet Protocol (IP) network to improve our quality of service.

Recently, many anti-spam organizations have blacklisted a large number of IP addresses from TM’s network. Due to this many customers have been unable to send emails from their mail server to companies who might be using database from the abovementioned anti-spam organizations.

These spamming activities by a small group have affected a large number [?] of our customers, regardless of the nature of their Internet usage.

Therefore, TM is taking immediate action to address this issue. Effective 3 December 2007 [this should read: right now], TM will block OUTBOUND Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) traffic or port 25 for all out going e-mails from dynamic IP addresses. Only Outbound SMTP traffic from smtp.streamyx.com and smtp.tm.net.my will be allowed

With this implementation, Streamyx customers who have their own mail server will not be able to send e-mails. As an alternative, TM is providing an open relay server for these customers who use dynamic IP addresses.

Jeff Ooi has written a blog post about this topic where you can find the latest updates.

Sigh… yet another reason to move my webhost overseas.

P/S: As I re-read my post I realize that I have a TM ad running from NuffNang on my left sidebar… check it out as they are running a 1 million ringgit contest. Just download a form and fill in a slogan for a chance to win 1 million, a car, or other cash prizes!