Email Policy and Tips

This page explains IAC's Policy on transmission of Email and expands on the information contained in our Wireless and Kiosk FAQ. If you have not read the summary information in the FAQ, it is recommended you read that first, as it may solve your problem without wading through this document, which by it's nature is more technical.

IAC's general Policy is not to block any services, but rely on Terms and Conditions of Service and the goodwill of customers. However, this open approach also means that one customer device infected with Viruses, Trojans, Worms and other Malware can affect the service for everyone. Regrettably we are having an increasing number of incidents and consequently we have decided to block the most commonly attacked service which generates Spam Email via the SMTP protocol on TCP port 25.

SMTP port 25 was one of the earliest protocols for transmitting email, however it's use these days should really be restricted to only server to server traffic and there is no real reason any more why this protocol should be used by user devices.

If you are a long term resident at a site where Wifi is provided by IAC and you have a specific need to use SMTP port 25 that cannot be resolved by other methods, please do get in touch so that we can discuss the alternatives.

SMTP on port 25 is almost always insecure and thus vulnerable to your email login and password being discovered and used to send Spam email. On "public" networks and most especially Wireless networks, it is very important to ensure any applications used are intrinsically secure, any that are not are vulnerable to being attacked.

The Internet is built to a series of standards many of which are known as RFCs. The RFC standards for client device submitted email are:-

SMTP (unencrypted) port 587

SMTPS (SSL encrypted) port 465

Most email providers do at least conform to the basic standards, but a small number still do not. Unfortunately you will need to talk to your email provider or view support information on their website to determine what protocols and ports they support.

Some may offer TLS encryption. SSL or TLS is perfectly acceptable, but depending on your email software one may be easier than the other to setup.

If your email provider supports it, you should as a first preference use SMTPS on port 465 with SSL encryption enabled.

Unfortunately it hard to provide more specific information as there are hundreds, if not thousands of different email providers, coupled with the combination of many different email software packages.

If all else fails then use a Webmail service, but be sure to use one where the address starts 'https'. Any site using encryption will show a padlock symbol giving details of the level of security provided. Confusingly, some sites with an address starting only 'http' can be SSL encrypted, but this is not best practice and harder to identify. If in doubt, consider sites starting only 'http' to be unsecured.