Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Any e-mail gurus here?

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-19-2015, 10:25 PM:

So I have an e-mail account. I can send and receive through my phone just fine. But I cannot send mail from the same account on my Mac. Both are using the same internet connection so it's not an issue of the ISP. I can't figure out what could be wrong. I tried Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook. Neither works. I put the same information in my e-mail client as is in the setting on my phone and I constantly get "Access denied" and "server timed out" errors. The SMTP server cannot be connected to under any circumstances whatsoever.

This is my primary form of communication and it's broken as all hell.

Posted by Stephan Shelley (Member # 8587) on 03-19-2015, 10:50 PM:

I would check your authentication setup and port numbers. In outlook some of this stuff is in advance menus. A lot of ISPs require SSL now.The defaults in your phone may be correct but different in outlook. Can you get your email via a web client until you get things sorted out? Your ISP may have a help page with detailed settings for outlook.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-19-2015, 11:03 PM:

My choices are:

Port 25 no SSL
Port 110 SSL (this works for receiving mail and I can GET mail fine)
Port 465 SSL
and I think Port 585 SSL

None work. No SMTP server can be connected to successfully.

I can send mail in a pinch through the web browser yes but it's a huge pain. Gotta log in each and every time and can't reply to mail that I receive in my client. It also does ZERO spam sorting even though lots of e-mail comes in with the header *****SPAM 06.4***** and whatnot it's all still in the main inbox.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-19-2015, 11:05 PM:

Proper user name, port numbers and SSL settings are all critical in making an e-mail client work properly. Not all e-mail client software works in the same way. If I do use an e-mail client application I tend to use Mozilla Thunderbird. But I'll copy all the settings from another machine that's working properly so the new installation will send & receive properly.

These days I tend to just keep my e-mail "in the cloud." I would use client-based e-mail software more if it didn't do stupid things like hiding all the e-mail inside the program. If you have to do something like factory reset your current computer or migrate your data to another computer it's just only a giant pain in the ass to backup your e-mail data and/or move it to another machine. If it's in the cloud you don't have to worry about any of that shit.

I might have still been interested in running e-mail client software if my ISP hadn't ditched Usenet access a few years ago.

quote: Joe Redifer
None work. No SMTP server can be connected to successfully.

Are you connecting to the correct POP3 and SMTP servers? I don't know about your ISP, but I know AT&T has several different ones for specific regions.

Sometimes it's a funny combination of things with the user name and password strings. Some e-mail clients want you to login using the entire e-mail address while others only want the characters in front of the "@" symbol.

Posted by Stephan Shelley (Member # 8587) on 03-19-2015, 11:33 PM:

Here is the link to the AT&T help page about setting up mail clients. The server names and port numbers will not be the same but I suspect 465 ssl is outgoing. There are how to's there for specific mail clients.

http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB401570&cv=812&_requestid=546856

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 03-19-2015, 11:45 PM:

I would definitely check your ISP's support page to see if they have any documentation about proper ports and protocols for email. Some ISP's do funny things when it comes to user names and passwords for email. If your email client has an auto-configure option, I would suggest trying that first to see what happens.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-20-2015, 02:25 AM:

This is not ISP mail. I've never set up my ISP e-mail account mainly because I'll drop an ISP crazy-fast if a better one comes along for the money.

Oy, Thunderbird! That's something I have not heard of in a long, long time. I decided to give it a go. It didn't even want to set up the account properly. Oh well.

And yeah it wants my full e-mail address for my login. I checked the settings on my phone to be sure.

Anyway I tried a few things like setting my outgoing server as mail.bobbyhendersonpornserver.com instead of smtp.bobbyhendersonpornserver.com. For some reason that seems to work. I do not know why. I'm sure it will break in a few days.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 03-20-2015, 05:08 AM:

You either use the SMTP server of your own provider, usually without authentication (your IP address serves as authentication) or the SMTP server of the company that provided you the e-mail address. In this latter case, you always need to log in and you should definitely only do this if SSL/TLS is supported. Also, try to avoid sending mail via TCP port 25, even if TLS is supported (Port 25 usually never speaks SSL). Many ISPs filter port 25 to all but their own SMTP servers to avoid their customers acting as a massive spam relay.

On mobile devices that roam between your data provider and wifi access points, using SSL/TLS for everything is an absolute requirement or else you'll get your e-mail account hacked rather sooner than later.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 03-20-2015, 11:27 AM:

quote: Joe Redifer
Anyway I tried a few things like setting my outgoing server as mail.bobbyhendersonpornserver.com instead of smtp.bobbyhendersonpornserver.com. For some reason that seems to work. I do not know why. I'm sure it will break in a few days.

I'll be sure to tell the FBI that server belongs to the flying spaghetti monster book author. My server only contains pictures of kittehs and videos of skateboarders fracturing their arms and legs.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-20-2015, 01:59 PM:

You can use a telnet client to interact with your email server directly. By typing the commands into your terminal manually, you can see exactly what happens, when it happens, and what responses you get from the server.

Telnet is a dandy to way to troubleshoot issues of this nature.