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I've finally been conned into giving giving up my back door!

Whilst this may at first sound like another post about my illness, it is not. I'm referring to the fact that I've enjoyed the ability to run my own webserver for the 7 years I've been hosting this website, even though my Internet Service Provider (ISP) Comcast has posted for many years that they block port 25 inbound. They do indeed block port 25 outbound, but the inbound has always remained open. At least I've always managed to get inbound port 25 maybe through some backdoor access. Anyway, that has always seemed pretty reasonable to me as the risk of leaving the inbound open would only be to my server and not to them.

A few months back I started getting letters and emails that I needed to upgrade my modem to the latest and greatest in order to get better upload and download speeds. I ignored these to start with as I was in the process of divorce and moving house and it really didn't seem like the most important thing at the time if I'm being honest. Well, after I moved, I thought I'd treat myself to the super duper new faster modem, so I purchased one, hooked it up and a phone call to the ISP later I was up and running. What they didn't tell me was that they flashed the modem with a config file that blocks inbound port 25 as well as outbound. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're controlling this access with the security policies on the cable modems. I'm sure there's a way to hack this, but to be honest, it seems like that's a path of trying to get yourself banned and more trouble than it's worth.

Google used to offer free email domain hosting with their Google Apps service, but this has been deprecated since December 2012. Microsoft appear to be offering this service with Outlook.com and, if I had more time, I might look into this as it does look like a pretty neat service. The reason I didn't jump on it is because it's a web service they provide and I need to know if I can connect my own interface into the email server to send emails - for sending out things like the weekly email summary. I'm pretty sure you can and it's probably simply running on port 587 or maybe 465, but I got to thinking about how much I actually use email for this website and it ranges somewhere between very little and extremely little. I've set up emailing through gmail for some friends, so that seemed the fastest route to go through as it didn't involve any research. So gone is xx@eastbayrag.com to be replaced with a single email of eastbayrag@gmail.com that will serve as this website's point of contact going forward. Well, I've left my email server up and running behind its Comcast protected firewall so if it ever gets opened or there's a way to have your inbound email route to a port other than 25 I may start it up again, but until then ....

Now, for the nobody who's reading this as I'm sure this is purely for my own benefit, you may be wondering how the weekly emails have been working whilst I've had this issue. Well, the block only stops me receiving email. I can send email by relaying my server off the Comcast one, so outbound works fine. Crazy really.