Advice required on email issue

[hab1966]

Our company broadband supplier is Zen. Currently we have an email server running in the office which picks all our emails up and then distributes them.

We now have two new staff who occasionally come into the office and need to use their own email accounts (they dont need a company email account), one is with eclipse the other ntl. They can plug their laptops into the network and get full internet access, but they can only receive their emails. They get an error when they try to send an email.

We havent changed their email accounts on their laptops, so in the case of the eclipse user, the pop account is still mail.eclipse.co.uk and the smtp is smtp.eclipse.co.uk.

Another member of staff and myself use fastmail accounts and have our pop and smtp set for mail.messagingengine.com and these work fine on the network. Am i correct in thinking that the smtp server for ntl and eclipse is not visible from the internet, which is why we cant see them here?

What do I/we need to do to allow these two staff to send emails?

[plasticpig]

http://webmail.eclipse.co.uk/ for the Eclipse customer and www.virginmedia.com/webmail/ for the Ntl one. You can usualy send an Email via webmail but I dont know the specifics for these ISP's.

[jamieboy]

hab1966 said:

Am i correct in thinking that the smtp server for ntl and eclipse is not visible from the internet, which is why we cant see them here?

Not sure about these two, but we have a client with Vispa, and their smtp server only accepts connections from a machine with an IP address in the Vispa block, so it could be a similar problem.

[malman]

You probably need to use smtp authentication as you are trying to access the smtp server from outside its own network. Look up smtp auth on the respective help sites or talk to the ISPs about whether they use it

[hab1966]

Thanks for the replies.

plasticpig: I'm afraid both staff have said they dont want to use webmail; they want to use outlook if at all possible.

jamieboy: I thought I'd read (a while back) that ISP's were trying to cut down on having thier smtp servers blitzed by spammers, so would only accept email from valid IP addresses. This would make a lot of sense.

malman: good suggestion. I will try that, I'm guessing if there is authentication then it wont matter what the IP the mail comes from as you are validated as being a valid user?

[jamieboy]

hab1966 said:

Thanks for the replies.

plasticpig: I'm afraid both staff have said they dont want to use webmail; they want to use outlook if at all possible.

jamieboy: I thought I'd read (a while back) that ISP's were trying to cut down on having thier smtp servers blitzed by spammers, so would only accept email from valid IP addresses. This would make a lot of sense.

malman: good suggestion. I will try that, I'm guessing if there is authentication then it wont matter what the IP the mail comes from as you are validated as being a valid user?

With Vispa, it has to be both - an authenticated connection to their SMTP server from an IP address in the Vispa range.

Like I say, may not be the case for ntl or eclipse, though.

[malman]

generally if its authenticated then they will let you in from other networks but there are always exceptions

[ashes]

its usually pop.domainname and smtp.domainname

e.g. pop.ntlworld.com

If not try pop3 or mail - one of these nearly always works whatever provider!

[wildeep]

Zens SMTP server is mailhost.zen.co.uk