from Hacker News

DigitalOcean blocks SMTP ports 465 and 587 since last month

by leni536 on 4/8/25, 11:07 AM with 17 comments

  • by rubatuga on 4/8/25, 5:19 PM

    If you need unblocked ports you can also use https://hoppy.network

    We provide ports 25, 465, 587

    Disclaimer: cofounder of hoppy

  • by grumpyinfosec on 4/8/25, 4:15 PM

    This makes alot of business sense, most orgs know better than to homebrew their mail env on (lets be honest here) "basement hosting LLC". So that leaves the people that are spamming/phishing as the core SMTP customer here.

    We lost the personal self hosting fight long ago. I used to do it, but now i pay protonmail to do it for me and even that is losing its luster since proton technology IP blocks are pretty radioactive at this point. Some day will have join the outlook or gmail gang which makes me sad; but setting here in my chair staring at my orgs email firewalls and seeing 80+% inbound volume being auto-blocked as spam, bulk or phishing it make me wonder if anything of value was lost.

  • by LinuxBender on 4/9/25, 12:46 AM

    Most of the VPS providers have been implementing variations of this for a few years now. Most of them will not block ports on accounts created before a certain date and will open the ports for people that open a ticket and state they will not be sending UCE and are responsible postmasters that will secure their mail servers inbound traffic and accepting an agreement that if they abuse it or let someone else abuse it their account is gone. Seems more than fair to me. It's a nice alternative to having to say, "and this is why we can't have nice things." We can have nice things.

  • by selectnull on 4/8/25, 11:14 AM

    "we strongly recommend against running your own mail server in favor of using a dedicated email deliverability platform"

    This is ridiculous. We have collectively surrendered email and became hostages. I'm as guilty as everyone* and don't really see the solution.

    * most. You're the brave ones.

  • by bulatb on 4/8/25, 10:43 PM

    It looks like this is only for accounts created after June 22, 2022. Mine are older and their emails have been going out before and since.

    I never even heard about this.

    https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/smtp-restricted-by-default

  • by leni536 on 4/8/25, 11:07 AM

    Old support page: https://web.archive.org/web/20241217094107/https://docs.digi...

    Not sure how this change makes sense.

  • by systemswizard on 4/10/25, 3:17 AM

    A lot of hosting providers do this. Some will even allow their use if you ask too

  • by vel0city on 4/8/25, 5:32 PM

    News to me, my SMTP servers on DO are still working just fine.

  • by niux on 4/9/25, 7:57 AM

    Can't you use another port to send emails?