Email, ISP, and the Headaches

Posted on May 8th, 2010 by Larry Pages Online

Recently I received a support call from a customer who was not receiving mail from one of her partners. After some lengthy troubleshooting, we found that the partner’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) was listed on some of the public SPAM blacklists. This actually came as a shock to us since the ISP is a very large telecommunications provider in the South.

Since customer service is our focus, we did not leave the issue as someone else’s problem, we attempted to work with the ISP to resolve their problem. Try to imagine our shock when the ISP told us that they were aware of the issue, had no intention of resolving it, and were sorry for the “Inconvenience”.

I tell this story because it brings to light one of the major problems with ISP’s and their free add-on email services, but the story gets better.

We decided to use a pay for SMTP email service (SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transmission Protocol and is the electronic language used to move email throughout the Internet). We signed up with the service and configured the email clients to send mail to the new service. Once again we got shot down. The ISP was blocking all SMTP traffic through their connection that did not go to their server.

We finally resolved the client’s problem with both a short term and a long term solution that did not require them to host their own email server internally.

What this has shown us is that even the biggest ISP’s sometimes take the easy path instead of the right path to solutions and that sometimes free add-on email services are not the right solution for a business that considers email to be a vital business tool.

Robert Gaynor is the President and CEO of Boca IT Solutions, Inc. Boca IT Solutions is a Microsoft Partner that specializes in the small to medium business market. For more information on this and other information technology topics, please visit bocaitsolutions.com bocaitsolutions.com

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