Re: ISP has screwed up smtp for me... what to try? New ISP?
Kenward Vaughan wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I hate writing this from my school's web access page, but I suddenly lost the ability to send emails from home. Receiving is fine. Nothing had changed at my end from the night before, when I had no problems. My ISP is Earthlink.
>
> I couldn't figure out originally what the issue was, until I tried using both Balsa and Kmail instead of mutt/exim. The error messages returned indicated that they needed to be configured for authentication.
>
> Fine. Set that up, seemingly no-brainer choices in the menus, including a test to see what the server supported. Nothing works. Tried all combinations the apps gave me.
>
> Tried to configure exim4 to do the same, putting the full addresses that host gave me for smtp.earthlink.net and smtpauth.earthlink.net along with a user ID/password for each. Even added the option about using clear text over unencrypted lines.
>
> All no go. I've got a bunch of frozen messages, with no place to go.
>
> I chatted with Earthlink, which was futile. "We do not support alternate OS's." I told them both in the chat and questionaire at the end that such an attitude really stank, that they would lose me if I don't find an answer from somewhere, and that this was no good for their good will in the community.
>
> I looked through their docs on reconfiguring various email apps and plugged in those values into Kmail/Balsa with no luck (includin a port of 587 for the smtpauth addresses).
>
> Doesn't someone out there have an earthlink account, and how do you set things up? Is something sitting there staring me in the face that will work?
>
I believe I'd try telnetting to their smtp server, something like:
telnet smtp.earthlink.com 587
and see if you can log in with your username/password. If not, you've
got a username/password/account problem. But I've never done this, so
don't know the exact steps. I'd suspect Google to be your friend.
--
Kent West
Westing Peacefully <http://kentwest.blogspot.com>
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