This post is dedicated to all of the useful online services that email on behalf of their users.
Gang, SMTP Authentication is everywhere. It’s not going anywhere any time soon. Y’all better start getting used to it.
As my regular readers ought to know by now, my day job (i.e., when I’m not behind the camera or curled around a book) is working as an IT Consultant. The organization I work for operates 1 email server and 3 web servers. Our mail server runs on SmarterMail, which is a really incredible and underknown mail server. Easy to use, pretty darn secure, etc etc.
Our mail server employs SMTP authentication for all 12-15 of the domains we host email for. This is, generally, a good thing. SMTP authentication is NOT new anymore, and most commercial ISPs employ it or some other form of SMTP security.
And yet, the email newsletter services, the membership management services…… even big service providers (cough, cough, Salesforce) fail to support SMTP-Auth. Forcing email providers whose subscribers use these services to either refuse to support them or to poke holes in email security for umpteen different IP addresses.
This is beyond ridiculous. Isn’t it time yet to catch up to pre-Web-2.0 tech? Either provide your own email servers which send mail from your system out (with the appropriate reply address attached, of course) or allow your users to configure a login and password for SMTP auth when they configure their mail server address. It’s as simple as that.
