Emails not getting through

[sarah844]

Got an email conundrum and wondered if anyone can shed any light.

One of my friends is having problems with his email at work. Two or three of his customers send him emails but when he replies he gets an email message saying the delivery has failed, even though he is doing a reply on the email the customer sent him. He's changed his hosting provider and still this happens. He uses Outlook to manage his email. Any ideas?

[Vision2]

check the SMTP port, try changing it to something else, also get him to talk to his ISP, some require you to use their SMTP servers to send out email.

lot of isp's do this, its highly annoying :)

[crossdaz]

Got an email conundrum and wondered if anyone can shed any light.

One of my friends is having problems with his email at work. Two or three of his customers send him emails but when he replies he gets an email message saying the delivery has failed, even though he is doing a reply on the email the customer sent him. He's changed his hosting provider and still this happens. He uses Outlook to manage his email. Any ideas?


I've had this a couple of times. Delete the account from Outlook
Go to the web host and change the password for the email account
Then set it up again in outlook.

For some reason this seems to reset whatever is causing the problem. I have 38 active websites and email accounts on each. No problems at all except for 2 that had this problem. No amount of conversation with my host could get to the bottom of it but the new password trick worked like magic?

[sarah844]

Thanks guys, will pass this info on and see if either of those 2 remedies work. Will let you know

[paultnl]

Try mxtoolbox.com lots of useful diagnostics

[KM-Tiger]

... when he replies he gets an email message saying the delivery has failed ...

To diagnose this properly one needs to know what that bounce message says in detail.

[sarah844]

It says:


A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

(name@emailaddress)
retry timeout exceeded

There was no specific error detail.

[openmind]

That means that the receiving mail server was unavailable for longer than the specified retry time. Assuming the address being sent to is correct, it is the receiving mail server with a problem.

Either that or the mail server has been setup to specifically reject email from that domain or IP without responding with a reason. It could also mean that his ISP could not establish a connection to the mail server.

Get him to speak to his ISP in the first instance.

[smo]

I would have a guess that his domain has been blacklisted for some reason (spamming etc.) and as a result the mail is automatically rejected.

Are the recepients using AOL by any chance?

[Wizemail]

First thing to check is whether or not the email address he is sending to is correct – send a test from Gmail/hotmail/yahoo to confirm.

The headers of the client email can be set to send replies to a differing email address that the email was sent from.

This can be checked in Outlook by right clicking on the ‘From’ & ‘Subject Line’ bit in the inbox (not the top of the preview) and select ‘Message Options’ – this shows the full headers and you can see where it was actually sent from and to.

I’d guess it was pretty unlikely your client has been Black Listed, but this can be checked here - http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx (http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx) - make sure the IP is of the mailserver, not the local machine.

Better to spend a few minutes doing this than reconfiguring his company’s email servers if it’s the recipient address that is sending the wrong info.

Good Luck,
Don

[sanjiv]

What SMTP server is he using?

Is it by any chance Google, Google Apps or Sky.

[sarah844]

No idea to be honest, i've just passed all this info on to him and he's going to ask his IT guy to look into it with these suggestions i'm sure they should be able to fathom it out. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.