Just discovered what looks like a change to Bell Sympatico‘s outgoing e-mail servers. 

My parents both use their own domain name’s for their e-mail.  Their internet connection is with Sympatico, which forces them to use Sympatico’s authenticated SMTP server for their outgoing mail.  This type of setup is common (in fact, probably the standard now) with service providers, and has worked fine for a long time.  

Last week, out of the blue, all messages being sent out from either of their computers started showing up as being from <theirnamehere>@sympatico.ca instead of <username>@<theirdomain>.com and the from name (which gets displayed in the recipient’s e-mail client) is getting changed to the name that is on the account with Sympatico.  The subsequent problem to this is that if an e-mail client ignores the reply-to header, replies go back to the @sympatico.ca address, which they don’t use.

This is the second time I’ve seen Sympatico change their outgoing SMTP.  The first time, and I can’t remember when it started, outgoing e-mail had an On Behalf Of header attached to it with the @sympatico.ca e-mail address.  

Obviously the ISP is trying really hard to prevent abuse of their e-mail network.  But have they gone too far?