When you use OxONet's SMTP server to send mail, you are often sending mail to someone who is not an OxONet customer.  This is called relaying in e-mail terms.  If we allowed anyone to relay mail through our server, then we would be doing something very bad called running an open relay.  Not only you would be able to use it, but anyone in the world could use our server to send mail wherever they wanted.  This is a common technique used by  spammers to keep their mail from being traceable.

In order to avoid running an open relay, we require that you login to our mail server before you are allowed to relay mail to other places.  However, for security reasons we also require your login information to be encrypted.  This is why in general you must either use SSL or a non-plaintext login method to access our SMTP server.  In practice, most mail clients support only plaintext authentication, so this means you must use SSL to access SMTP. 

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