The premise sounds so simple: get someone’s email address and you can send them a note. Just like traditional mail, there’s never been an absolute guarantee your email will get to its destination, but lately it’s felt like email is being lost more and more. Everybody hates junk mail, but the anti-spam methods being utilized today are impacting the delivery of legitimate email.

Case in point: about two weeks ago I tried sending a note from my personal Comcast account to my wife’s work account. I was on my work network at HSRA, so according to Comcast’s rules for sending mail on non-Comcast networks, I need to use different, secure port numbers to connect to them (SSL using port 465 for outgoing SMTP mail and port 995 for receiving mail via POP). (more…)