bitcomet email

[dozeberry]

last night my bitcomet client tried to send an outgoing email message.

I blocked this from ever happening again.

My question is, what was the emails end destination?

what kind of information would have been in that email and should i be concerned about the one email that it sent out?

thanx for any info that gets posted

[kluelos]

IF Bitcomet actually did try to send an email, then you should be in no doubt about who it was to and what it was for. BitComet does this when it encounters an unrecoverable error, and notifies you first that it wants to do this, which you must give permission for in each case. (Oh, and in case it's not obvious, it means BitComet just crashed.) It's unmistakable when it happens.

Since that evidently didn't occur, it's fairly obvious something else is going on.

"Tried to send an email", "I blocked it", suggests to me that your firewall is telling you this, not BitComet.

As you are probably aware, BitComet needs a listen port which must be open, in order to achieve its best speed. Unfortunately, some bittorrent users find themselves in a situation they do not control, where most available ports are blocked by an external firewall. One solution to this, is for those persons to use one of the ports which is unblocked because it's commonly used for another purpose.

Such ports include those commonly used for e-mail -- which is why they're not blocked too. If you're not running an email server (few people do), then the port is available for other purposes (such as bittorrent) on THAT system. So some people choose to make that their listen port.

What your firewall is actually detecting is activity on the port. It assumes, wrongly, that it must be email. The traffic is normal bittorrent traffic, not email, but the firewall doesn't stop to analyze the content. So it falsely reports that BitComet is "trying to send email".

I understand the situation, but can still wish people would not do this because it does get firewalls and such all excited about the traffic. Blocking it is basically up to you. It's not harmful, but it may be annoying. If you can, you may compromise and tell your firewall that this is ok for your bittorrent client, but not for other applications generally.