Have you ever been away from the office and your expecting an important email?  You grab your laptop and get over to the nearest hotspot/restaurant or you might even be in your hotel room.  You log-in as usual and send one or two emails out and everything’s fine but your Inbox is empty and it doesn’t seem like your getting any emails.  Before you give a call-in to your email support team, there are a few checks that you can do on your own to help you diagnose the problem, saving time and frustration.

There are a few basic checks you can do on the ports that your emails are sent through, but we’ll focus on one.   First, the most basic test is to check the connection to the port in the Command Prompt.  To get here, open your Windows ‘ Start Menu or select the Windows Key on your keyboard.  Go to “Run” which should be right above your “Start Button” in Windows.  Select “Run” and a box will open and type into the field “cmd” and OK or select your  Enter Key.    Wait for another box to open.  This will be the Command Prompt and it will be all black w/white letters.  It will say C:\Documents and Settings\yourname> and the cursor will be blinking.  Type in:

telnet mail.domain.com 25

…where mail.domain.com is your domain.  If everything is okay you will see something similar to  “220 mail.domain.com”.  If the port is blocked it will say “Cannot Connect”.

The protocol that runs over Port 25 is called SMTP.   So basically this port is being blocked by either the ISP or a firewall.  Again this is just a quick diagnostic test that you can run on your own and it gives you some general idea of what’s going on if your experiencing problems receiving your mail away from the office.

What should you do if Port 25 is being blocked?  The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is blocking this port and you will need to call them.  If you’re in a hotel room check with the front desk first to see if there is a firewall that’s blocking your port and if they don’t have one they should be able to direct you to their ISP for help if those ports can be changed.  If you’re at a hotspot/restaurant you’ll need to move to another hotspot that isn’t blocking port 25.  Good luck, because getting the port changed at one of these spots is unlikely.   If you are getting this error it’s the ISP you need to contact, it’ll be easier to find another hotspot. Your support team cannot fix the issue, they can only inform you to contact your ISP to make these changes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Email, SmartMail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.