E-mail Problems

Problems Sending or Receiving E-mail

• Cannot connect to server
• Authenication errors
• Mail undeliverable
• Error 553

First make sure your website is running because no website means no mail server. Next check for the ability to connect to the running server and if your able to connect we must check if it is up and running check below for possible solutions.

• Website must be up. If your account is not yet “live” then neither is your email which is part of the hosting account
• You must be able to connect to the server without a block from your ISP or regional outage of the internet
• You must have actually created a mail account and added a mail box to the account on the server
• Your email software must be configured properly for the email account and authenticate the name & password
• Once sent, the recipients server must accept the email

1. Cannot Connect to Mail Server – If you’re trying to send or receive email from your email accounts on your mail server, your primary domain hosting account must be working and accessible. Possible reasons you can’t connect to your mail server are:
   • Your domain is new or you recently edited your DNS settings and it is still propagating. (wait 24 hours)
   • There is a regional outage between your local ISP and our mail server preventing the connection from completing (do a trace)
   • The server is off line or not working. (check the server uptime status page)
2. Server Not Configured – You must create each of your pop3 email accounts on the server first and make sure you check the mail box check box otherwise the mail account does not store email. Make sure to setup all email accounts using lower case letters.
3. Email Client Software Not Properly Configured – Each email client is slightly different and you should check the tutorials in the quick setup guide or your software’s built in help. Confirm that both POP3 and SMTP servers are set to mail.yourdomain.com, also make sure you have the “my server requires authentication” box checked, and that the mail ports are set to 110 for POP3 and 25 for SMTP. Also make sure you setup each account name using lower case letters.
4. Port Block If you domain IS working, and you can received email but cannot send or get a message that says “cannot connect to server” then your LAN or ISP may have a firewall or port block prohibiting your use of port 25 to send emails. Further some ISP’s permit port 25 but only for their own mail servers. For example if you use MindSpring as your ISP, they may permit outbound emails from you@mindspring.com but block you@yourdomain.com.

   Port checks must be done from your local computer in order to confirm the port 25 pathway to our server is available.
   Open a DOS window (start, programs, accessories, DOS) and type “tracert mail.yourdomain.com” (without the quotations).

   This will show each hop between routers to the mail server. If you get an error message “cannot find server” you have a port block. If not, the trace will complete and will various hops and hop times and should end in the IP address of the webserver that is hosting your domain. If you see a bunch of *** or very long delay times or it stops in the middle and does not terminate with the last line being an IP address, then the point where it stops is the point of internet outage.

5. Error 553 that address is not in my list of permitted recipients. – This is caused when email client software configured with multiple email accounts from different domains is used to send email to an account that it has not checked for messages first.

Remedy: Check your email from an account before sending or Set your Email Client to check email every 15 minutes or Close and reopen your Mail Client

Example: If your email address is bob@yourcompany.com and your password is nice When you send an email your mail client (outlook express) says I am an email account “bob” on domain “yourcompany.com” and my password is “nice” Our server then looks up that information on your account, and if correct sends the email through.

The last transparent part is after our server sends it through it sends back a confirmation handshake to your browser that instructs it to move that email into your “sent folder” confirming it was sent and this handshake ID is retained in the browser’s identity cache for 10 minutes. The next time you send an email to a different email account, your browser is supposed to have checked it’s POP mail on that new account to re-identify itself BEFORE resending out a new SMTP outbound email request. This is called “POP before SMTP”.

Depending on the mail client, it will retain its old IP signature so it has the identity of the last email account it sent to, and therefore the first time it tries to send to a different account will fail the authentication process and give you the error you received.