Anyway, yesterday's highlight was initiated with a mail, seemingly sent to all customers, informing me that
ACTION REQUIRED: Comcast has determined that your computer(s) have been used to send unsolicited email ("spam"), which is generally an indicator of a virus. For your own protection and that of other Comcast customers, we have taken steps to prevent further transmission of spam from your computer(s).and the email went on to recommend some Windows anti-spam measures, including a reference to a page I could only open with IE at work and one URL to a page that doesn't exist. Nice. Not. Needless to say, there are now Windows computers sending mail (via Comcast) here (as the lone windows box, my wife's work laptop goes straight to her university webmail).
And obviously, they blocked port 25, so no more mail sending from home. So I grumpily logged a compaint having been on hold and in telephony menu hell for fifteen or twenty minutes. I was promised to hear back in 72 hours. Hasn't happened yet, naturally, but we're only half way through...
Anyway, to make a long story short and this post constructive: Here is what you do on a Debian or Ubuntu system running exim as your mail transport:
sudo editor
/etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost
and add a line port = submission in the
remote_smtp_smarthost block (assumming you have the split
configuration chosen for the exim4-config package). Setting
port to 'submission' switches from plain old STMP to the authenticated
version running on port 587; submission is mapped to 587 in
/etc/services.
sudo editor /etc/exim4/passwd.client and add your user and
password id as e.g. for comcast web-login
sudo update-exim4.conf to update the configuration
sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart to restart exim
/var/log/exim4/mainlog for any
irregularities. Barring those, you should now be sending mail to you
smarthost using authenticated transfer over port 587.
In the meantime, it looks like they unblocked port 25 at some point today...