Topic awaiting preservation: This is weird!? Applications sends emails WITHOUT AUTHENTICATION?? WHats going on???

I guys.. work on my project seems to be going along real well ok however we're almost onto partial implementation and I've just noticed something weird with the mail server we're interacting with. Like most of you are ware that my project is roundcube mail based. Well the mail server we're dealing with for some strange reason doesn't seem to support any type of authentication whatsoever!?!?!? Pretty weird now ain't it... I mean like upon making a connection with the mail server or any mailserver you expect it to return some information on what kind of authentication it uses eg. PLAIN, MD5 whatever howeveer all this mailserver returns is just a hello note.

And plus because of that my mail wrapper function can't send any email because it fails upon authentication HOWEVER if I comment out the part where my applictaions tries to doany authentication and instead send an EMAIL IT GOES THROUGH!?!?!?!?? I might want to ask the server providors what the story is but just would like to ask whether this is a normal situation or so? The mailserver actually relays the mails along different channels so its not just email u know...

I'm not sure why but it works normally in outlook and outlook doesn't seem to shwo any need for any weird configuration or so?

Are we talking smpt or imap?


Does it just accept mail for it's own domain?
Then that behaviour is correct. But if it accepts for
any domain, it's an open relay and needs to be
secured like yesterday... Though I'd expect them to be
on half a dozen blacklists already.

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Its not that kind of mail server.. you send email to it and it relays it forward as fax messages i.e its a fax relayer something whatchamacallit [sorry my jargon is shot ]...it doesn't send to any email on the planet..

The only form of authentication it appears to take is the from address i.e. if the from address is registered - it accepts and relays the email otherwise we get a bounced back mail which doesn't say much.

Oh they do charge per message relayed though....

We're talking about SMTP here I believe well thats what the wrapper function does...

(Edited by paritycheck on 01-20-2008 07:15)

still -without authentication this is a great way to send faxes in another person's name,
provided you know their from address.

What do they say to the problem?

I just discussed this issue with my boss - at first he didn't buy that it was possible but when I demonstrated it to him in his outlook he's real worried though.

For now we're gonna contact the service providor and ask them whats going on? Would let you guys know what follows up...

Atleast this time no ones saying its all my fault