SMTP without authentication from a Sonic IP address?

[forest]

Hi there.

I've been a Sonic customer for about ten years, and until recently, I've been sending mail without having to authenticate to mail.sonic.net so long as I connect from a Sonic IP address. Earlier this year, the server started refusing my messages, but only sometimes. The error given is "Relaying denied. Proper authentication required." If I retry enough times, my message is eventually accepted.

I have multiple machines running various kinds of email software (desktop user agents, command line user agents, transfer agents, etc.), so configuring every one of them with my Sonic username and password is both cumbersome and a bit of a security problem. (Storing my password unencrypted in multiple places makes the security admin in me twitch, as I think about how it can be used to access my incoming email and therefore most of my accounts on the internet.) In other words, I really don't want to have to start managing SMTP server logins just to keep my mail-sending systems working as they have for a decade.

I find it really puzzling that Sonic would deliberately disable the functionality that has worked so well for so long, and even more puzzling that the change would only take effect some of the time. Can someone shed some light on this, and better yet, fix it?

[kgc]

Forest - I would strongly encourage you to use SMTP AUTH, this is a better solution for several reasons - if you don't want to store your username/password in extra places (besides your MUA which probably already has it) you could create a mailbox account whose sole purpose was to use for authenticating outbound mail. You could even create one for each location.

What you've run into is that our IP based relay lists for outbound mail has gotten out of date. This is my fault, and needs to be taken care of. The only reason this problem has been let slide is that the substantial majority of users are using SMTP AUTH and I'd much rather have everyone using authentication since it gives us 100% positive correlation between an account and outbound mail flow for abuse prevention and tracking and prevents people on our network who are not authorized to send mail out of our servers (think random public wifi on our network) from doing so.

[forest]

Thanks for the information, Kelsey.

Your suggestion of using a special-purpose mailbox account is somewhat better than using my main account, but it's still a hassle for me. I'd really like to keep my systems configured as they have been for ages, and avoid having to manage another account and more configuration in multiple places. If it makes you feel any better, I have a long history of keeping my home network clean and free of email abuse. Think you could update the relay lists soon?