Email update

6 Comments

Turns out that the email setup here at Mary Anne and Kevin's place is such that I'm not going to be able to send outgoing mail. I can still receive mail just fine; I just can't send it.

(As someone who travels a fair bit, I'm finding it really frustrating that ISPs are putting more and more restrictions on this stuff. In my world, it's common for someone to travel with a laptop and want to be able to send mail from it using a friend's Internet connection; but ISPs are apparently doing things like (geek alert) blocking access to port 25 on any server other than theirs, and requiring the customer to specify a set of valid email return addresses that they can send from, effectively disabling outgoing mail for anyone other than the customer. I suppose it makes sense from the ISP's point of view, but it makes it hard for people to allow their visitors to send email.)

(Even more geeky aside: I have a mac.com trial account, and mac.com allows you to connect to port 587 if your ISP blocks outgoing connections to port 25. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to convince mac.com to send my mail—it keeps resetting the connection.)

So for the next few days, I'll only be sending mail during times when I go down the block to a cafe that provides wireless. So don't expect timely responses from me to email. And autoresponses to SH submissions will once again be a little slow. :( But should still be within a day or two. If I keep running into this sort of problem, I may have to reconsider my approach to autoresponses.

6 Responses to “Email update”

  1. Tom

    Y’know, I can send you a Gmail invite which should let you send mail from anywhere you can access a web browser, even if you don’t want to use it as your primary account after the trip. : -)

    [Just drop a line to me (your co-worker) at my firstname.lastname@gmail.com and I’ll send an invite.]

    reply

  2. Jed

    Thanks, Tom! Sorry, I should’ve been clearer: I have a gmail account, and I have webmail access to my regular non-gmail account too; I could use either of those approaches to send mail. But I want to send mail from within Eudora, ’cause that lets me track outgoing mail in a consistent way.

    But yeah, in an emergency, I could certainly send from either of those web-based systems. Thanks for the reminder; I tend to forget about those options.

    reply

  3. naomi_traveller

    I had to get SBC to unblock port 25 so I could send out with my IMAP client of choice. Fortunately, they provide a helpful web form to do so:
    Assuming MA and Kevin are amenable, and have SBC, you want http://help.sbcglobal.net/servabuse.php, then choose abuse > opt out from port 25 filtering.

    Enter the e-mail addresses that your IMAP client uses, and the sbcglobal.net e-mail account for their reference. It was fixed within 24 hrs.

    reply

  4. irilyth

    Chaos and I can probably help with this, by giving you an account on a server (our new one) where you can send mail via either port 587 or 465 with SMTP AUTH. Stay tuned for more about that.

    reply

  5. Susan

    Jed, I’ve had a bitch of a time with this (on and off) while travelling. The good news on my end was that I was never in any one place for more than two or three days, so whenever I came across a place where I couldn’t send email, I just crossed my fingers and hoped that nothing important would happen until I’d moved on to a place with a more enlightened ISP. When I was staying with Kyle in Indiana, we spent the better part of an afternoon jumping through hoops trying to get it to work, and I thought I’d settled on a solution (I could use his DSL username and password on a sending-mail-only Eudora identity) except that he didn’t know what his password might be. You’ve probably tried something similar, though.

    reply

  6. Jed

    Thanks, all!

    Naomi: Alas, M and K don’t have SBC.

    irilyth: That would be great! And might be useful for the future even though the immediate problem has been solved. For example, it seems like that approach would get around the occasional case of Pair being blacklisted by clueless ISPs.

    Susan: Yeah, I was on the verge of asking Kevin for his username and password (it sounds like your situation was the same as mine is here), except that then he told me that Ameritech allows only a pre-specified set of email addresses to send mail—so even if I had his username and password, I would only be able to send mail from his or M’s email addresses.

    I’ve run into the not-knowing-your-ISP-password thing before; in fact, at this point I tend to assume that most people don’t know their ISP passwords. It’s so rarely needed….

    reply

Join the Conversation

Click here to cancel reply.