AT&T kills my customers port 25 (email)

[jinjuku]

Been working fine with AT&T DSL since 2003 (if you can call DLS 'fine). Fast forward to last Thursday the outbound queues start backing up and show undeliverable. I telnet to 25 on the loopback and get my 220 HELO and my banner.

I check my firewall rules (Sonic Wall) and it seems unchanged. I take another router out, config for PPPoE, and swap out. Still nothing.

I telnet to mail.domain.com 25 and no connection.

I call AT&T. I didn't know that they have tier 1 to tier 4 technical support. Soon found that out along with the fact they were all in-effective AND they refuse to troubleshoot the DSL circuit since it's NOT U-Verse. I kid you not. They have to get U-Verse.

They tried U-Verse 3 years ago and the AT&T tech couldn't get their own box registered and they took down the customers Internet for 4 days in the process (I set them up with cell data backup for the interim).

So they get U-Verse installed smoothly today. Go to telnet to mail.domain.com 25 and... Nothing. Spin up the cell hot spot and mail.domain.com 25 answers 220 HELO right away. Plug into the 2nd LAN port on the AT&T box, by-passing the firewall, still nothing.

At this point I've had a back channel to someone at AT&T that USED to work in the NOC. The only competent person that I've managed to speak with and HE can't hit someone else's port 25 either.

Setting up hosted G Suite...

Dear god.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Use http://canyouseeme.org/ to check if port 25 is open.
You could've used hosted smart relay for smtp, like this one :
https://www.noip.com/managed-mail
Also zoho provides free email upto 50 accounts.
If native mapi support is required and you don't like office 365 much, i had a great success with Rackspace hosted exchange.

 

[jinjuku]

Use canyouseeme.com to check if port 25 is open.
You could've used hosted smart relay for smtp, like this one :
https://www.noip.com/managed-mail
Also zoho provides free email upto 50 accounts.
If native mapi support is required and you don't like office 365 much, i had a great success with Rackspace hosted exchange.

I already know port 25 on the remote hosts are open. I spun up a cell phone hot spot and verified and that's how I have their email working for now.

Sorry, the hot spot was quicker than spending money on a relay or other bridgehead.

I tried Zoho a few years ago and didn't like the tech support and their spam filtering wasn't effective and their blacklisting service? Blacklist a domain I was getting spam from and kept on getting it. No thank you. I called their tech support on the latter and that's how I found out their support sucked too.

G Suite is free for 14 days and it's a company I know I can trust to do things right. I setup Exchange 5.5 in 99 for them and Exchange 2003 in 2003. It's been incredibly robust and rock solid.

AT&T has this so incredibly buggered.

Sorry, not looking for solutions as I already solved them temporarily Friday.

Just needing to vent about the layer after layer of bureaucracy. In the end it was a back channel from a phone# of the AT&T tech from 4 years ago!

We are evaluating everything infrastructure wise to see if they can realize any productivity increases by going either Azure or AWS. I have everything humming along so smoothly that their costs in the past 18 years has been trivial.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Yeah, ain't nobody beating Google's spam filtering. One thing I know is that Google is known to build good quality software and provide as little as possible support for it.

 

[jinjuku]

Yeah, ain't nobody beating Google's spam filtering. One thing I know is that Google is known to build good quality software and provide as little as possible support for it.

For the cost of G Suite it's a no brainer.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

For the cost of G Suite it's a no brainer.

I don't know. I mean, spam filter is all solid, but like I said if native mapi is a must - ie Users insist on using Outlook and all it's glorious functions (imho installing GSSMO seems not elegant solution)
Also pricing wise. $5/user/month is surely cheap, but only 30gb storage.
Rackspace hosted exchange is $7.99 for 100gb mailboxes/user. Addon for email archive is only $3 extra.
G Suite could be even cheaper with annual plans, but I'm not sure they are still available.
So pricing is not far off at all.

Never has an issue with them (RS) and their support is actually excellent. They helped with free migration, fully handled by them from Mailstreet whom decided to stop providing hosted exchange.

Not trying to change your mind about this particular customer of yours. Just sharing my experience.
I think G suit is much more than just email, but how many of its functions your clients will actually use?

 

[jinjuku]

I think G suit is much more than just email, but how many of its functions your clients will actually use?

It's why we are evaluating....

 

[j_garcia]

Friend of mine locally who lives in a remote area says his line from AT&T is dead too.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Friend of mine locally who lives in a remote area says his line from AT&T is dead too.

Just to be clear, Jinjuku is pissed off not since the AT&T DSL "line" is dead, but since they started to block outgoing email traffic thus his client no longer could use their own email server on their DSL internet.

 

[j_garcia]

Friend said they've been talking to AT&T about it lately and they're basically trying to support DSL as little as possible in an (intentional or unintentional) because it is older tech. They're not upgrading hardware or doing anything for it going forward. They actually told him it would take them one month to fix the servers that are hosting a large portion of the US DSL under them.

 

[jinjuku]

Just to be clear, Jinjuku is pissed off not since the AT&T DSL "line" is dead, but since they started to block outgoing email traffic thus his client no longer could use their own email server on their DSL internet.

Correct and they just removed the ACL blocking 25 about 30 minutes ago and all my queues flushed out and are back to normal.

So this was deeper into their routing fabric because it affected the U-Verse account too. I can not believe we were the only call about this.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Yeah, their goal is to move every old DSL customer to capped fixed 4G internet, this way it saves them lots of money for not needing to deal with last mile wiring - it's one of biggest expenses ISPs have.
Such service comes with like 30gb/month with very pricy overages after it. Usually is also comes with worse latency.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Correct and they just removed the ACL blocking 25 about 30 minutes ago and all my queues flushed out and are back to normal.

So this was deeper into their routing fabric because it affected the U-Verse account too. I can not believe we were the only call about this.

Just curious, was is a residential or commercial DSL account?

 

[jinjuku]

Just curious, was is a residential or commercial DSL account?

Commercial