It is not often that I rant on this blog. But this really pisses me off.

At least in Europe, hotels think they have to “proxy” my SMTP connections – well a better word than “proxying” would be “man in the middle attack” I guess. So all outgoing mail goes via their SMTP servers and they forward them to the real server. I am using SMTP over SSL for all my mail accounts – and of course this cannot work with a man in the middle. So this means I have to lower my security just to be able to send emails – and to add insult to injury – some of them force you to do this over unsecured wireless networks. WTF!?

After spending some time talking to support staff I finally got an answer why they are doing that: “It is because of SPAM – we don’t want that anybody can send SPAM emails without notice over the hotel network…” Wow – how lame!

So what I normally end up doing is to use my Googlemail account – they also do SSL over SMTP but don’t use the normal TCP/25 for that – and this just works (but of course causes other problems like ending up in junk mail folders because people don’t have this account in their address book and messing up replies etc).

What an effective countermeasure against SPAM…