T-Mobile SMTP Interception

Hedda and I have been in South Bend for the last couple of weeks spending time with the family. Fortunately, most of my work can occur remotely, so I am easily able to get work done while we’re here. However, her parents’ home doesn’t have any broadband, so I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the local Borders Books cafe because they are T-Mobile Hotspot.

I sent an email to a co-worker at the Library of Congress this afternoon, and it was returned to me as blocked for spam. You see, T-Mobile is intercepting my SMTP connection to my email server and re-routing it to their own. Check out this header snippet from a test email I sent myself. This is the first header in the email:

Received: from [10.222.130.229] (unknown [10.222.130.229])
	by mailrelay.t-mobile.com (Postfix) with ESMTP
	for <noreply@ardvaark.net>; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:48:47 -0600 (CST)`

I promise you that my outgoing SMTP server is not configured as mailrelay.t-mobile.com.

I am shocked and angry. First of all, they are using the network to mess with connections that I am making, and that’s not cool. What is worse, though, is that a direct result of their meddling is my inability to send emails to my employer! Sure, I can work around it in a couple of different ways (most of them involving SSH), but it’s annoying as hell.

Up yours, T-Mobile.