Having some problems with a FreeBSD mail server (SMTP)

[Andrew Falanga]

On Thursday 31 July 2008 03:31:36 Barry Byrne wrote:

>
> Andrew:
>
> I've seen a similar problem from time to time with Outlook 2003 clients.
> For seemingly no reason whatsoever, they give a timeout sending mail.
> Googling the error code throws up many with the same error and no solution
> that I've found. Telneting to port 25 or even running the Outlook test mail
> account feature still work, while Outlook comlains it can't send.
>
> The workaround is to quit Outlook and start again. By quitting Outlook, the
> user must choose 'exit' from the 'file' menu. Simply closing the close box
> still leaves Outlook in memory and the problem remains. The problem seems
> to happen perhaps once or twice a month for some users.
>
> Regards,
>
> Barry


To everyone who responded,

Thanks for the great suggestions.  A couple of you replied that they've seen 
issues with this and resolved them by closing down Outlook, by the "File --> 
Exit" method rather than the "X" in the upper right.  I'm really beginning to 
suspect this because the pastor I was working with told me that our senior 
pastor explained to him that he could send from a particular coffee shop in 
town when he couldn't from church.

Though I can't personally see a down side to having an office in a Starbucks 
(I don't know the name of the actual shop they were in), I think that the 
Outlook client get's some bad stuff in the cache that is flushed out when 
they shutdown their computers to go make the journey.  The pastor I was 
dealing with said he went there and all of this mail sent without a hitch.

The other possibility is that the ISP is blocking some particular port.  We 
did just change ISP's within the last 2 weeks and according to this pastor, 
these sending problems originated at that time.  We'll see.

Andy