[GRLUG] new Comcast mail blocking?

[John-Thomas Richards]

I have been using exim to send my mail for years.  I use my account at
Dreamhost as a smarthost.  I have been on Comcast since it was ATTBI
since it was @home.

I have been sending mail from my box with exim for years (for as long as
I have been using Debian).  Since 2004 I have been using my Dreamhost
account as a smarthost; exim sends my messages to my mail server at
Dreamhost to deliver them.  This has worked for four years.

For some reason, late last week sending mail from home stopped working.
Messages would be delayed until I connected to the net elsewhere.  How
could Comcast block this?  Exim uses a random outgoing port to connect
to the smarthost.  It connects *to* port 25 on the server, but why would
Comcast block that (could they?)?  Comcast doesn't want me to run a web
server from my house and so it blocks port 80, but it would never block
me from connecting to port 80 on a server somewhere else yet that is
what it appears to be doing on port 25.

I am able to send this message from home because I changed exim's
configuration to use port 587 on the Dreamhost server.

Am I correct in assuming that Comcast is blocking me from connecting to
a specific port elsewhere?
-- 
john-thomas
------
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and
moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)