iptables - port 25 not getting traffic even though default policy is ACCEPT and all rules are flushed

I am having a problem that's driving me up the wall. I have a server, where after several attempts at various iptable rules, I have flushed iptable rules and set default policy to accept.

The output of $ sudo iptables -L:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

I do have postfix listening on the port as can be found on $ sudo netstat -tulnp:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      9639/master

When I run nmap from my local machine $ sudo nmap -p 25 <server-ip>:

PORT   STATE    SERVICE
25/tcp filtered smtp

When I run nmap from the server itself $ sudo nmap -p 25 localhost:

PORT   STATE SERVICE
25/tcp open  smtp

When I telnet to the server from my local machine, the connection timesout. But if I telnet on the server itself $ telnet localhost 25 then I see:

Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 <server-domain> ESMTP Postfix

I'm really at my wits end. I found some other posts on this site and other stack-exchange ones about similar issues, but the problem there seemed to be that the service was not running and listening on port 25. But as you can see from the netstat command, the postfix process is listening to port 25 on this server.

Can anyone please give me pointers on what to try next?

Oh also tried $ sudo tcpdump -n port 25 while the connection attempt was made. But there were no packets captured. But tcpdump captured packets when I connected from the server itself $ telnet localhost 25.

Many ISPs don’t allow SMTP traffic. They block or drop all such traffic.

Contact your ISP or hosting provider to ask whether they allow port 25 traffic.