Cannot send mail on dialup connection, receives fine

G

Gregg Hill

Hello!

Please bear with me as I am not very familiar with Macs. I have a user on a
Mac laptop running OS X with Entourage for email (not sure of the version).
When he is on a high-speed connection, it works fine for inbound and
outbound mail. When he is on an EarthLink dialup in a hotel, he can receive
mail but cannot send. He gets the following error.

Mail could not be sent using the account
_____@__________.com.
A connection failure has occurred.
Error: -23016

He has Entourage set up properly as far as POP server address, SMTP server
address, and SMTP requiring authentication. As I said, it only fails when
used on a slow dialup connection. That error is related to timeouts
according to http://www.entourage.mvps.org/error/page.html#error-23016, but
I cannot find a way to increase the server timeouts. On a PC using Outlook
Express or Outlook, server timeouts can be changed, so I was hoping the same
would be true with Entourage. Is it possible to increase the server timeout
in Entourage (or somewhere else)?

I will have him set his POP and SMTP to the server's IP address to reduce
DNS lookup time as a factor, but I doubt that it will help enough.

Thank you for any suggestions!

Gregg Hill
 
M

Mickey Stevens

This is a SMTP authentication error, occurring because EarthLink blocks
outgoing traffic on port 25, which is the port generally used by SMTP
servers. When the user is at the hotel, have him go to Tools > Accounts,
and open the account. Then, instruct him to change the Sending Mail (SMTP)
server entry to <smtp.earthlink.net> (without the angle brackets). Then
have him click the "Advanced Sending Options" button and uncheck the
options. That should address the issue.

As you might imagine, this can be tedious to do regularly. For that reason,
Paul Berkowitz has published a free script called "SMTP Location X", which
will automate the setting changes when he goes to dialup or vice-versa. You
can get it here:
<http://www.scriptbuilders.net/category.php?search=SMTP+Location>
 
G

Gregg Hill

Mickey,

Thank you for the information. Why would EarthLink do that? I know they want
to stop relaying, but blocking port 25 completely is just wrong!

I'll grab that script and send it to him. Thanks again!

Gregg Hill
 
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