Is it possible to have internet access but not be able to send/receive emails?

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

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Friend of mine said her office network can get online but cannot send or receive to any of her POP3 email accounts on her domain.

She can access her email via Webmail on the domain or a third party system such as Mail2web but has no email access via Outlook. This was working fine previously and has only decided to stop working in the past few days. Her laptop works fine in any other location on a wireless network and she can send/receive as normal.

She had an IT bod in and he said he could not ping the server her domain was located on from the office. Yet she has normal internet access via IE?.

The IT bod also said the following :-

"Incoming mail server 110, no connection, incorrect firewall. Capacity too busy to accept connection, mail server down".

I'm thinking it is definately an issue with the network that the owners of the office building provide rather than an issue with the domain and the server it is located upon?.
 
BeeP said:
Could be a blocked port maybe?
Click to expand...

What one, the incoming port or outgoing SMTP one?.

She is on port 26 outgoing which I would imagine most others in her building to be on, it being possibly the most common port to use as outgoing?.

bledd, as far as hosts file goes, would that be on the individual PC's in her office or on the PC's which run/control the network?.
 
Is it BOTH sending and receiving or just sending?

Usually port 110 is allowed by most smaller businesses, bigger ones block it to stop people wasting bandwidth downloading massive personal mailboxes.

Port 25 is the standard outgoing port for SMTP, this is commonly blocked my most businesses as it blocks the majority of spam bots using their PCs as a base to spam, which often results in their WAN IP being blacklisted by mail providers/peers. Usually this has to be relayed off of the local enterprise mail server to get out.
If she's using port 26 in her client this could well be the problem? Simply changing it to port 25 might fix it.

If she can alter the settings at the service providing end then I'd suggest changing the port numbers to non-default ones and possibly enabling SSL ontop of that if she still gets problems.

However before doing this first step is to ask if ports have been blocked by the administrators and if so why. If they've blocked it and you find a way around you could fall foul of Corporate IT Usage policy which can (if they're anal) get you disciplinary action.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

It appears to be just receiving email that is the issue. They seem to be able to send without any problems.
 
Ok.
she needs to:
Go to start > run and type "telnet prefix.domain.com 110"
Replacing the center part with her mail server address/url. If you get a prompt of any kind e.g "POP3 daemon version 1.1.1" then it is working fine in terms of connectivity. If the window closes either the domain or port are blocked somewhere.

If the above worked then it's probably an authentication issue. There should be an error messsage in outlook that comes up when she hits send recieve that'll help explain what's wrong.
However common causes is clicking the forgotten password link or resetting the password on webmail page often resets the mailbox password used by BOTH webmail and POP3 logins, so the password needs updating in outlook config to the new one set.


Any error message detail would be very helpful in this case.
 
Hi,

Okay, just got an email back from the hosting company saying the office IP address was blocked "Due to POP3 login failures" which is why the email receiving did not work. :confused:

What do "POP3 login failures" refer to?. As far as I know all the PC's in her office have Outlook set to remember their respective passwords so how can a login failure arise?. Or does login failure mean it failed not because the passwords were incorrect but because it simply could not reach the server through their office network to login for some reason?.
 
It means incorrect password attempts. The reasons I gave above could easily account for it, if you reset your webmail password it often changes your POP3 password too. If outlook has remembered the old password it will keep trying with the wrong one until something like this happens.
 
Okeydoke, she has just emailed me to let me know everyone in the office is now back to fully functional emails!!.

Thanks for the advice, especially the bit about changing passwords.

Appreciate it m8. :)
 
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