Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

SMTP Mail and Verizon

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This morning I’m still trying to clean up my servers and I’ve run into another issue. Looks like Verizon is blocking all SMTP mail from one of my servers;

 host relay.verizon.net[206.46.232.11] refused
    to talk to me: 571 Email from 162.243.40.10 is currently blocked by Verizon
    Online's anti-spam system. The email sender or Email Service Provider may
    visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block.
    151214

Ok, it’s quite possible that someone on the discussion forums has been a misbehaving so I need to make sure there’s no legitimacy to this report. I need to scour the log files and make sure that there’s nothing going on. I keep the log files on my server for 30 days, let’s do some quick crude command line fu;

[root@moon ~]# grep -h @verizon /var/log/maillog* | awk '{ print $7 }' | sort | uniq -c
    427 to=nobody@verizon.net,

Note: I’ve obfuscated the email above so I don’t end up getting any more spam than I already receive daily.

Now that’s very interesting, I’m the only person that the server has been trying to mail which is getting denied by Verizon. Ok, so this problem is only impacting me, I guess that’s good.

So if it’s been going on for 30 days then I need to make sure the server is not listed on some RBL (real-time black list) somewhere. I’ll check http://www.blacklistalert.org/;

rbl-listing

Alright so I wasn’t listed on any of the RBL, I looked through the logs for any other anomalies and found none, focusing again on mail for Verizon customers (verizon.net/verizon.com) and found nothing, I searched the discussion forums user database and blog comment subscriptions and found nothing. It must be a false positive on Verizon’s side, I’ll submit a request to Verizon following their instructions. I went to http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and I tried submitting a request as a Verizon customer and the form submission crashed with the following;

VerizonSMTPWhitelistCrash

Ok, so I went back and submitted a request as an ISP (although I’m not an ISP but I’m starting to feel like one). That form was successfully submitted and I quickly received a reply via email.

VerizonSMTPWhitelistReply

That’s a boiler plate reply if I’ve ever seen one. Ok, so this doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy… I’ll need to chase the folks at abuse@verizon.net and probably in Twitter as well.

Cheers!

T-Mobile Wireless – Family Plan

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I was recently shopping for a new wireless carrier, one that could provide 5 lines for the entire family without bankrupting me every month. It doesn’t help that I have three teenagers, the oldest of which is occasionally known to blow through her current pre-paid plan only a few days into the billing cycle. I had been a Verizon Wireless customer for the past 7 years but I just couldn’t make the budget fit with any of the Verizon plans. I looked at Ting, Sprint, AT&T and finally T-Mobile. Ting looked like a great option at first but after thinking about how to micro-manage the data and texting habits of three teenage girls I decided there had to be better option. samsung-galaxy-note-4-t-mobile

After running all the numbers time and time again I landed on T-Mobile.

I purchased a pair of Samsung Galaxy Note 4s for myself and my wife and then I ordered a pair of Motorola Moto Es for my twin girls. My oldest daughter has been using a Motorola Moto G for the past two years and had been asking for an Apple iPhone,iphone6-silver not wanting to be the tech father that pushed his kids to non-Apple solutions I ordered an Apple iPhone 6 for her from T-Mobile. I had looked around at various refurbs/second-hand from sites like Amazon and Gazelle but choose to purchase new seeing how she’s taken pretty good care of her Motorola Moto G.

My experience with T-Mobile has been fairly good to date. I will call out David the sales order representative that I spoke to while placing the order with T-Mobile. David initially tried to tell me that the 2GB plan was for “flip phones”. I politely told David that I wasn’t in need of an upsell and my daughters would be fine with 2GB data plan. After that point David was very helpful and successfully placed the order.

With Verizon I was paying ~ $130/monthly for 2 lines with 2GB of data each, 500 SMS text messages and 700 minutes shared between the phones in the plan. That equates to about $3,120 over the course of the two year contract plus the $299 I paid for the Motorola Moto X when I first purchased it (buy one get one free). So all total I paid Verizon just over $3,400 for 2 lines. With T-Mobile I’ll be paying ~ $110/monthly for 5 lines with 2GB of data each, unlimited SMS text messaging and unlimited minutes. That will equate to about $2,880 over the course of two years plus the ~ $2,100 I paid for all 5 phones (2 Samsung Galaxy Note 4s, the Apple iPhone 6 and the 2 Motorola Moto Es). The benefit here is that I have my entire family on a single plan (no more pre-paid phones) and I’m free to jump ship (to any GSM capable provider) since I purchased the phones outright.

Update: I just received my first bill.. $144/monthly with all the taxes included… that’s $34/monthly in taxes and fees, 23% of the bill.

Motorola Moto G flashed to Page Plus Cellular

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I spent a few hours this weekend flashing a Boost Mobile Motorola Moto G to work with Page Plus Cellular which is Verizon Wireless MVNO. I followed the instructions from the XDA Developers forum along with a post on Howard Forums. The process was straight forward although I did have to re-image the phone a few times to get the right version and the correct sequence. I stumbled across the post in XDA Developers forum while reading the article entitled, Motorola adds LTE and microSD support to the Moto G in Engadget. I had promised my oldest daughter that I would replace her aging Motorola Droid 3 if I could get the Moto G in a CMDA version that worked on the Verizon Wireless CDMA 3G network.

Cheers!

Verizon FiOS TV to utilize MPEG-4 H.264

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Verizon FiOS TV will start utilizing MPEG-4 (H.264) to encode some of their channels beginning sometime after April 15, 2013. The use of MPEG-4 isn’t completely new to Verizon FiOS TV, last year around April 2012 they started carrying all the MLB Extra Innings channels along with a few other premium channels in MPEG-4, this year they are expanding the number of channels they are encoding in MPEG-4 so a larger number of their customers will be impacted.

It’s my current understanding that if you have a QIP-6200 or QIP-6416 STB that you’ll need a replacement assuming you have a package that allows access to any of the channels mentioned below.

VerizonSTB-MPG4-all

You can check whether or not you need to order a replacement by going through the STB menus, Menu -> Customer Support -> Set Top Box Exchange.

Cheers!

Verizon Email Servers now supporting SSL?

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It’s true and you need to make some configuration changes as soon as possible if you utilize a Verizon email account.

I received the following notification this week that informs Verizon customers that Verizon’s Email servers are now supporting SSL when utilizing POP3 and SMTP to send and receive email from a traditional email client such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird,  Microsoft’s Outlook or your Android or Apple Smartphone.

VerizonSSLEmail

This is very exciting news because you hopefully already know that your username and password are sent in the clear when utilizing POP3 and SMTP (with authentication) when not utilizing SSL. So the answer to the ages old question of does Verizon support SSL encryption has changed? They now support SSL encryption on both the POP3 (receiving) and SMTP (sending) for traditional email clients.

OutlookVerizonPOP3-1I made the changed to my Microsoft Outlook client and it works perfectly.

OutlookVerizonPOP3-2

You’ll need to dig deep into the settings to modify the port numbers that are utilized for both POP3 and SMTP, they can be found under “More Settings…”

You can find additional configuration information on Verizon’s website at this link.

I also recently noticed that Verizon now redirects any attempts to connect to http://webmail.verizon.net to the SSL secured site at https://webmail.verizon.net which again is very exciting from a security perspective.

Now you can safely utilize that public hotspot or guest network without worrying if someone is going to steal your username and password when you try and check your inbox. This change is long overdue and very welcome in my opinion.

Cheers!

Update: March 20, 2013

I just noticed that Verizon is only encrypting the actual login (passing the user credentials). They are not encrypting the entire session which includes the actual contents of the message or any attachments. This approach was helpful 5 years ago but not today, I’m not sure if Verizon is using secure COOKIES or not but this approach is usually susceptible to session hijacking.

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