LIME St. Lucia Communicates to Customers on SMTP Blocking Issue - with Tight Deadline?

This is an update to the precursor articles:

• LIME St. Lucia SMTP Blocking - End User Edition
• 2009-09-12 - LIME St. Lucia - Blocks SMTP Communication - Outbound Traffic on Port 25 - Disrupts a Business from Sending E-mail for at Least 1 Week!

On September 15th, 2009, at 10:35 hours AST (Atlantic Standard Time) LIME St. Lucia sent an e-mail to customers titled "FW: Email Experience/Spamming":

1. Requesting information on the mail servers used by their business.
2. Encouraging those hosting mail servers on-site and using dynamic IP addresses to move to using a static IP address.
3. Requesting the information be sent by close of business today (September 15th, 2009).

Clearly they have not accounted for the situation where the clients do not host an on-site mail server (and therefore have no need for a static IP address, a static IP has a monthly recurrent cost) and wish to maintain communication with their 3rd party e-mail service provider!


Consider the scenario where an employee expects to access his e-mail from Microsoft Outlook on his residential LIME-provisioned ADSL connection at his home. This e-mail could be hosted either on his business place's on-site mail server or on that of a 3rd party provider. Let's hope that employee and his technical support / e-mail service providers are aware of the alternative means of regaining productivity!


Where are the Caribbean's Telecommunication Regulatory Authorities and Consumer Commissions on this matter? I know I e-mailed NTRC (http://www.ntrc.org.lc) at ntrc_slu@candw.lc - e-mail from their web page!


As of September 15th, 2009, 13:20 hrs AST no update was done in the Service Alerts (http://www.time4lime.com/whats_new.jsp?whats_menu=Service_Alerts) or Press Releases (http://www.time4lime.com/whats_new.jsp?whats_menu=Press_Releases) section of the LIME St. Lucia web-site.


By the way, those direct hyper-links above are likely to fail because the web server would NOT know the country context unless chosen from on the LIME Home Page (http://www.time4lime.com). Any further discussion on this is for another blog though. :-)