The ‘open and free’ internet is standards based, so you cannot force port 587. If what you intend could be done then why would Vultr block just port 25? They would go on to block 587 as well, no?
They want to take your money but they don’t want you to send out unlimited email from their IP address.
No, it’s not. Web hosts are businesses selling to other businesses. Blocking a port needed for communication would be like the telephone company telling you that you can have a handset, but no line; or the electric company telling you that you can have a light bulb, but no socket for it.
My answer to your problem would be to find a better host.
Part of the problem is that many hosting companies want to automate everything, so literally anyone can open an account with no human intervention. The host I use doesn’t. They manually verify a new client’s identity, address, and business license, and require a business credit card, before activating the client’s first server. But they don’t block any ports.
They made an exception in my case because they were aware of the meltdown that was going on at HFW: but only after a senior support tech interviewed me over the phone, decided I sounded legit, and checked the reputation of the IP on the server I was leaving. They let me migrate overnight (on Christmas Eve!), and do the paperwork the next business day.
I would run – not walk – away from any hosting company that blocked any service port. But I guess that’s just me, because there are many companies that do.
I somewhat agree, but at the same time most of the major players in the game do this.
And to be fair, if you could pay $0.02 to have a server for a couple of hours, blasting spam left & right without any consequence whatsoever, I feel that would be A LOT worse.
This is a fine approach to combat this problem and a ticket takes 1 minute to submit. They answer really fast and the closed port is no more.
Well, that I agree on. Fortunately in most situations it’s only a ticket away, like f.ex. DO, Vultr, AWS and so on.
Back when I was working at a small town ISP we closed port 25 for all our consumer customers.
We only had 3-4k customers and even then several times per week we would have some moron who clicked a pop-up, got their computer infected and started sending spam.
After a while we found it easier to close it by default and those who had a legitimate reason to open it, we would put on a static IP range instead that had no restrictions.
This is slightly off topic, but still relevant as to WHY this is becoming more and more common practice.
I think I will just open a ticket with Vultr, for the time being. This is basically just a learning experiment for me, not really a production environment.
As I understand it, though, emails should be sent out 587, anyway…
Okay, in that case, I think you might find the whole process by which mail gets from your device to the recipient’s device interesting. This Wikipedia article isn’t a bad introduction.
In all honesty, if you read and understand that article, you’ll know more about email than a lot of people I know in this business (including more than a few who work support). It’s not rocket surgery, mind you. But most people don’t bother taking the time to learn. You apparently are one of the exceptions. That’s a good thing.
For my part, Postfix still baffles me because I used Exim for many years. But I have enough of an understanding of email itself that I manage to keep the mail moving. Otherwise, I would have farmed it out by now.
Sometimes – most times, really – it helps to have a little knowledge of the theory behind the mechanics.
That’s because mailservers communicate with other mailservers on port 25, you can’t change that.
You can relay via services like Mailchannels, Sendgrid whatever (which is a whole different setup) using other ports, but for sending emails to other servers you will need port 25 to be open, and this cannot be worked around I’m afraid.
I used to think closing port 25 was stupid but these days I support the practice. When I had a droplet at Digital Ocean they opened it for me in short time after asking. Vultr will likely do the same once they’re convinced you’re legit and harmless.
You can’t configure the Internet, you can only configure your server. The Internet thinks port 25 is the SMTP port. You aren’t going to convince the Internet otherwise by demanding it or repeating the demand to us here in the forums.
If you can’t send and receive mail on port 25, you don’t have a mail server. That’s not me or Virtualmin limiting you. I also cannot configure the Internet.
Providers blocking port 25 is common, even if we don’t love it. The ones that will open a port on request are much better than the ones that won’t (e.g. Google, Amazon, etc. most of the big cloud providers require you to relay through a third party, or pay for a separate relay or mail service from them).
