“POP before SMTP” support phased out

Many, many years ago, some e-mail programs didn’t use a password when sending outgoing mail. That meant they didn’t work with many mail servers, including ours. To help customers with that problem, we used to allow a horrible alternate method called “POP before SMTP”, although it was never recommended or officially supported (it was unreliable and made it harder for us to prevent spam).

Well, here we are in a new millennium (“welcome!”). No popular mail program has needed “POP before SMTP” for more than a decade, and only a small handful of our customers are still using it. But spammers are continually trying to take advantage of the security problems it creates for all e-mail addresses, making it just as much of a nuisance on our end as it ever was.

Because of that, we no longer allow e-mail addresses to send mail using “POP before SMTP” unless they were previously doing so. In other words, if an address wasn’t using “POP before SMTP” before now, it won’t be able to start using it in the future.

This change shouldn’t affect anyone. New customers shouldn’t need this “feature” at all, but it will continue to work for the small number of addresses already using it (based on our mail logs for the past couple of months).

The correct settings to use for any mail program are shown on our mail program setup pages. If you use those settings when you’re configuring a new mail program, you won’t have any problems.

And if you’re still relying on “POP before SMTP”, remember that you shouldn’t. We don’t guarantee that it will be available in the future. You should change your settings if your mail program allows you to do so.