SMTP blocked between ISPs

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

Telia, the largest ISP in Sweden is forced by AOL to block all outbound 
connections towards port 25 at some random destination from DSL 
customers (and ISP's which are virtual ISPs regarding DSL in the 
network Telia own). Reason is that AOL threatened to block Telia AS 
from accessing all AOL services if this doesn't happen.

Telia in the pressrelease just issued asks customers confirms people 
with their own SMTP servers will no longer be able to access AOL. 
Instead, their users should get email accounts at Yahoo, Hotmail or the 
ISP they use (Telia or one of the virtual DSL providers).

I have talked with Telia a lot of times (and they have talked with me). 
The problem Telia has is that they very very seldom get the IP 
addresses of the hosts which have sent spam to AOL, but because AOL is 
larger, the only thing they can do is to do as AOL requests. I know 
Telia has a large group of "hunters" finding hosts running 
relay-smtp-servers and spammers, so I know they do probably more than 
most other ISPs. Still AOL have hunted Telia for months now.

I have not heard anything else from other ISPs so the question is 
whether Telia has exceptionally bad customers, or if this is just 
because Telia is large, and we will see similar things from other ISP's 
later on.

What worries me is that this blocking of port 25 is going _against_ the 
path which I want to see, that we have no relay in the world. Blocking 
port 25 _increases_ the amount of relays.

So I don't see it stopping anything at all. Because of this, AOL forces 
Telia to do the wrong thing.

Like peeing in the pants. Nice for a while, but then extremely cold and 
nasty.

Anyone know anyone at AOL which one can talk with about their thinking? 
(I know people at Telia.)

Anyone have seen this in other locations?

   paf