On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Francois Gouget wrote:
Sure they have the right to deny me access to their mail server, but to imply that I'm only allowed to connect to my ISP's mail server is bullshit.
Exactly why? You *should* use your ISP's mail server, that's what it's there for. Anything else is inefficient and plain stupid. You've found one of the reasons it's stupid - another is that if the target mailserver is unreachable for the moment, it's better to let the ISP's mailserver try again for the usual 5 days than to sit dialed up yourself for 5 days. Yet another reason would be that since your ISP generally has more bandwidth than your own dialup connection, both SMTP connections are less likely to time out and cause unnecessary retries, delays, and traffic.
Well, I cannot tell you that you should switch to another ISP, it would be too easy for me and hypocritical as I'm not sure I would do it if I were in your situation. I'll see if I can send them a complaint email (without it getting bounced).
Maybe *you* should switch to another ISP, one that is able to educate their users properly.