SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) is used for the 
transmission of e-mail on the Internet. 


Many ISPs and Web Hosting Providers are discontinuing the  practice of 
providing unrestricted outgoing SMTP -- largely due to lack of proper methods 
of identifying whether a sender is a legitimate user which in turn leads to a 
high level of vulnerability of spam, abuse and denial of service attacks. 

Webvisions will be introducing Authenticated SMTP  Service as a default 
option for all customers when as of end of April 2002. This is a value added 
service that is provided at no extra cost to our customers. All customers' 
mail servers will also default to Authenticated SMTP by end April 2002. 



Questions;

How does Webvisions implement authenticated SMTP ?

When retrieving your POP email, your email client makes use of  your pop 
password to validate the legitimacy of a pop user id.  Using this same pop 
email id and pop password, your  Virtual Mail Server will authenticate any 
users against them to  validate that the user(s) sending the email is a 
valid user. 


Employing this technique helps to reduce the amount of  unsolicited email 
sent via your mail server, prevents it from being blackholed by ORBz and RBL 
services, reduces traffic  overhead, increases smtp performance and reduces 
spam on the Internet.

SMTP Authentication requires an email client that supports SMTP Authentication 
protocols. Fortunately, it is now becoming a common and necessary feature and 
most major e-mail clients like Eudora, Microsoft Outlook and Pegasus support it. 



What do I need to do ?

You'll need to configure your SMTP client to support either "Pop Before SMTP" 
or "Authenticated SMTP". You can configure them anytime before 30 April 2002. 
It works even now.

We have also created a comprehensive Help Guide for our  customer's ease. 
This is available at 
http://www.webvisions.com/support/smtpmail.html



Ok, I don't want to use authenticated SMTP. 


You can disable the feature via Webmanager -> Email Management.

You can also enable it from the same menu. However, please note that without 
authenticated SMTP, it makes it much easier for others to use your resources 
to send unsolicited emails.



Thank You,

Webvisions Support Team