Luminous

iTrader: (3)

I am pretty computer literate, having setup my own little network and port forwarding router. I was feeling a little smug in that everything had worked for ages without any issues.

Since Monday I have run into considerable email difficulties, and am now in way over my head

We have been unable to send any large emails since sunday using our POP3 server within Outlook 2003. Small emails will get through, but it may take a few goes. I am getting timeout messages, and broken connection messages. Sometimes I do not get any error message, but after an hour of trying to send a 250Kb file you can tell things are not going well

I have tried all sorts of things to get our emails to go, and have finally found some sort of solution. I just have no idea how this can be working

Our ISP is e7even.com
We have 2 POP3 accounts, one with BTopenworld the other GMail.

In desperation I decided to change the SMTP sever settings for the Btopenworld account from mail.btopenworld.com to smtp.e7even.com.

It worked!!!

How one earth can I be accessing and sending my mail through my BTopenworld account by using my e7even smtp server???

What about secuirty???

Is my email being bounced through e7 and then to bt? Are they forwarding my password details to allow me to log into my bt account?

BT are saying that their SMTP sever is working just fine, so why am I all of a sudden having issues accessing it? Is this something that my ISP could have done??

Are there any reasons why I should be concerned about using what BT says are incorrect settings (that is using e7's SMTP sever) to get my mail through my BTOpenworld account.


I do hope that you can shed some light into my confusion.

GaryScoobNCBR

okay i've seen this before, I believe that your hosts e7even are "catching" all your smtp outgoing packets, so it doesnt actually make a difference which smtp address you put in there it will still go through e7even's server.

Are your emails still going slow? or has this resolved the problem?

David_Wallis

who is your service provider, most isp's & mail servers only usually accept mail on what you would deem as their network... ie if your isp is wanadoo then then you should be able to send mail via their server and not via tiscali..

From what I can remember SMTP requires no authentication other than the address where the mail is coming from (but thats a std required field and can most likely be anything you like - Depending on their config)

POP3 requires authentication to retrieve mail, and you can normally retrieve mail from any pop3 server via any provider.

David

Edited becos i is fik and put there instead of their

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Thanks for those replies

This issue has been doing my nut in for the whole of this week

My ISP is e7even. I do have an email account with them (I set it up yesterday) which works fine with the settings that they have provided.

My main email account is with BTOpenworld, naively I decided to use the settings that they told me to use with regards to POP and SMTP severs. These settings have worked for over 1 year with our current ISP and 2 years with our previous one (Freeserve).

I'm really glad that you have seen this problem before Gary, and using e7's server to send my mail has indeed solved the problem. Why e7 have suddenly decided that I need to do this is beyond me. More importantly, why someone from their tech support department has not been able to tell me that this was the setting I needed to change is also a mystery

Thanks for your help guys, I think all is resolved atm (I hope)

ChrisB

The mail server I have in Telehouse has SMTP authentication enabled as we let people send via our server from any ISP, so hence is need to prevent it being an open relay. As David mentions, most ISPs limit relaying through their server by IP range.

We also have a second SMTP port available for customers who use an ISP who capture/block port 25.

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Well, at the moment my ISP and Mail Provider are doing my head in.

The ISP say that they in no way block access to anyone's SMTP server, and that they can access my specific server without any problem at all.

BTOpenworld claim that their mail server is fully functional, so it must be my ISPs fault. They confirm that all the settings that I am using are correct.

I know that I can access the web without issue. I can access my ISP SMTP server without issue, its just BTs that keeps dropping out on me.

Our ISP allows my send my BT mail through their SMTP server, but as I do not pay my ISP for email access I am limited in attachment size

I wish I could get them all in the same room as each other and get them to slog this out. One of those parties is about to lose a customer unless they get their finger out

David_Wallis

try using telnet..

telenet servername 25

servername can be mail.wherever.com or an ip address.

see if you get any messages back from a firewall / mail server.

David

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

I can open a telnet session with mail.btopenworld.com on port 25 without an issue it would seem.

However, I cannot reliably ping them. Out of 16 attempts, only 14 made it. Some of them came back with low latency, some were terrible.

The connection appears to be intermittant, and slow. But I can definately make the connection with the server, after all, I can send small email messages after a couple of attempts.