I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit of an eco-fan myself, and I get really mad reading these constant reports that suggest world leaders won’t come up with a satisfactory way forward at the Copenhagen conference in early December.

It’s great to see world leaders making pledges before the conference, but nobody seems to be taking the size of step that scientists are saying we need to… it all seems politically driven, leaders striving to look good within their country, and within the wider community. Already it seems to be clear that they’re going to come away from the negotiations with a non-legal agreement at best.

I’d really like to see a country have the guts to stand up and signup to cuts of at least the size estimated by scientists, and be done with it. Sod the wider world, and trying to get the agreement of every leader in the world to tidy up their own acts… just take the step forward and lead by example. There seems to be far too much worry about some countries not pulling their weight, and then getting a commercial advantage over greener countries. Well at least from an imports perspective, there’s a very simple answer… bring back trade barriers. They were abolished in most countries to allow for “free” trade, but in my view, if some countries aren’t pulling their weight, this is an easy answer… add a trade barrier to imports of goods from countiries based on their “population per head” type of stats. Fair enough, this doesn’t help exports, but there are a lot of countries that want to make positive change; such a bold step would give a commercial benefit to countries who bought into large scale change.

Here’s hoping the EU, US, or another big player takes such a large step, to put pressure on others to follow suit.

Why the heck is it that ISP’s feel the need to dictate to us the ports we should and shouldn’t make use of?

I say this having just spent near-on a week of frustration wondering why the BeachyUK server hated me and refused to send my mails! After finally finding some time to sit down and diagnose the issue, I’m really irritated that it seems my wonderful new Broadband provider (O2) have taken it upon themselves to block Port 25, to encourage me to send mail via their servers.

Quite apart from the fact that the choice of server I send my mail through is my own decision, I fail to see the benefit here to O2, they’re actually encouraging me to put more load on their SMTP server rather than use my own… hmm, maybe they have an interest in the mails I’m sending

So for anyone out there with the same issue with O2 Broadband (or another overly obsessive ISP), if you have control of your server, just change your mail sending port to an alternative port (and do the same on the server that’s receiving the mail, and hey presto, you’re back in business, despite the efforts of your ISP!)… otherwise, you’ll need to use your ISP’s relaying SMTP mail server to send mails, or you can use your mail servers SSL port, and send using SSL.

One finally thing actually… searching the Internet, I found a lot of sites (in fact, even O2’s help section), saying to use “smtp.o2.co.uk” for outgoing mail if you’re an O2 Broadband customer, this however is wrong for this use. The afore-named domain is for O2 mail users. If you’re looking to relay mail on behalf of your own domain you need to use “relay.o2broadband.co.uk” (no authetication required, and the mail will be seen to come from your domain name).