Zen Internet: The ISP That Forgot the 'Mail' in Internet

Proverb: When the gatekeepers forget the garden, the paths grow cold.

Parable: Once, the rivers of the Internet flowed freely, carrying the messages of all who built and shared. Then the keepers of the pipes closed their wells and sold the water by the cup.

“While many ISPs in the UK provide their own email services, few advertise or market a separate ‘smarthost’ service. Instead, companies like Advoco Solutions, ProDuty (outMail), and Arrowmail Ltd now offer dedicated smarthosts for businesses needing reliable email delivery…”

It comes with great sadness and dismay, a quiet disbelief that such a thing has come to pass.

Even Google’s own summary admits the reality: where ISPs once were the bridge, they now point customers elsewhere, to paid intermediaries whose very existence fills the gap the ISPs themselves created. It’s a quiet inversion of the old order. Once, the Internet meant direct connection. Now, to send an email, you must subscribe to yet another service layered on top of the one you already pay for.

Read what Google says...

We could, of course, set up a Postfix relay, or even a Qmail box if we wished to go properly old‑school, but the point is that we should not have to. The sadness is not technical, it is cultural; a reflection of what the Internet once was and what it has become.

Only today we enquired about becoming a partner, perhaps even a reseller, for Zen Internet.

Nothing says this page is to be a paid for feature: https://www.zen.co.uk/help-support/getting-consumer-email-details/

Now what remains to do? It seems we will set up our own mail server, because that appears to be the only remaining way to send email. Thankfully, Zen still offers reverse DNS for the IPv4 address provided as part of the service; without that reverse DNS, even our own mail server would fail to function. In the end, autonomy must replace convenience, for if the humble smarthost has been lost, the only refuge left is self‑reliance.

We simply wanted our webservers to send email via the smart host. The very smart host their own website refers to. The same one that Google confidently tells every Zen customer still exists, even its AI overview repeats the claim, advising users to set mailhost.zen.co.uk as their smarthost, use their Zen email address, and authenticate with their Zen password, a clear reinforcement of the expectation that the service still exists, even though later searches reveal Google's own AI Overview now concedes that Zen’s smarthost has vanished, gone the way of NNTP news servers and other relics of an earlier, freer Internet:

"Use mailhost.zen.co.uk on port 587 with TLS. Authenticate using your Zen email and password."

We followed that guidance. Everything connected, the handshake succeeded, STARTTLS negotiated perfectly, but then came the truth:

=== Trying mailhost.zen.co.uk:587...
=== Connected to mailhost.zen.co.uk.
<-  220 smarthost01b.sbp.mail.zen.net.uk ESMTP Exim 4.95 Ubuntu Thu, 09 Oct 2025 12:38:06 +0000
-> EHLO harvest.akadata.ltd
<-  250-smarthost01b.sbp.mail.zen.net.uk Hello harvest.akadata.ltd [217.155.241.55]
<-  250-SIZE 36700160

Authentication failed, and support confirmed the reason: there is no smarthost anymore.

"You have internet with us, but no email account. We don’t support using Zen as a smarthost."

That was the final word. It is not supported. There is no team a business customer can talk to, because it is not supported. Yet they will happily sell a mail package, one that’s not needed when a simple smarthost used to exist.

What happened to the Internet?

There was a time when running a web server on a broadband line was simple. You had connectivity, static IPs, and a relay host you could trust. The ISP knew its customers and enabled them to send legitimate mail without forcing third‑party SaaS or a full Linux mail stack.

Now, even for a business on Zen FTTP, the answer is no. No smarthost. No relay. No mail without outsourcing or hosting your own MTA.

This isn’t progress, it’s regression.

When an ISP nearly thirty years old stops offering the ability to send email through its own network, something fundamental has been lost. Zen Internet once represented technical clarity and trust. Today, it represents another gate in a once‑open web.

Connectivity without communication isn’t the Internet. It’s just bandwidth, a sterile pipe with no pulse. We can use Google, or Zoho, and yes, even Zoho still offers a smarthost we could use. Yet we wanted to use what had always been there, what defined the Internet’s cooperative spirit: a simple relay to send a message across a trusted line. It’s not so ‘smart’ any more is it? Removing such basics forces needless complexity and dependency, stripping away the essence of self‑hosted freedom that once made the Internet beautiful.

Epilogue: The irony is sharp. In a world obsessed with smart devices and smart systems, the simple ‘smart host’ the humble bridge that let honest systems talk, has gone dark.

If Zen, the company once defined by its integrity and technical openness, cannot preserve even the basic right to communicate freely through its own network, while a single static IP, Reverse DNS, and even the delegation of a full, shining /48 IPv6 CIDR to dns.he.net still exist,what hope remains for smaller providers when the humble smarthost does not?

So let this piece stand as both record and lament: that something so small, so simple, and once so essential has been forgotten by those who once championed the very principles of the Internet.