On Tue, 30 Apr 2002, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 12:28:36 -0400 From: Theo Van Dinter <felicity@kluge.net> Reply-To: wlug@mail.wlug.org To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Subject: Re: [Wlug] problems with email to hotmail.com
On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 12:10:08PM -0400, Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
I suspect that the problem is that I'm behind a linksys router using private IP's and NAT. I've tried talking to Charter tech support, but they are worthless -- they just tell me that they only support Outlook email.
I've tried configuring Pine so the it uses the Charter smtp server directly, but that doesn't seem to help, either. Right now, I'm using my local machine, and routing through Charter.
Any ideas?
Well, there's 2 possible issues. 1) it's likely that they block your outgoing directly to hotmail's mail servers. 2) most of the hotmail mail servers seem to be down or rejecting connections for me (via DSL), so they may just be having problems.
You can check out if you can connect directly via:
$ dig hotmail.com mx +short 5 mx11.hotmail.com. 5 mx12.hotmail.com. 5 mx13.hotmail.com. 5 mx14.hotmail.com. 5 mx15.hotmail.com. 5 mx01.hotmail.com. 5 mx02.hotmail.com. 5 mx04.hotmail.com. 5 mx05.hotmail.com. 5 mx06.hotmail.com. 5 mx07.hotmail.com. 5 mx08.hotmail.com. 5 mx09.hotmail.com. 5 mx10.hotmail.com.
$ telnet mx05.hotmail.com 25 Trying 64.4.56.199... telnet: connect to address 64.4.56.199: Connection refused Trying 65.54.254.145... Connected to mx05.hotmail.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 hotmail.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 5.0.2195.4905 ready at Tue, 30 Apr 2002 09:17:54 -0700 quit 221 2.0.0 hotmail.com Service closing transmission channel Connection closed by foreign host.
(I could only connect to 5, 9, and 13 of all of these 14 hosts...)
If you see a similar response to the telnet as I have above, you should be able to connect to hotmail just fine. Since 11 of their 14 hosts aren't responding, and all of the MX levels are the same (5), there may be an issue there. I know that you get a round-robin effect with the hosts, but I don't remember if it's single-attempt round robin (ie: try mx11, ok it failed, wait a little bit, then try mx11 again), if it's a single-attempt with lookups in between (ie: try mx11, ok it failed, wait a little bit, do a lookup and try the returned host round-robin again (so you may or may not get the same host again)), or if it's a multiple-attempt round robin (ie: try mx11, ok it failed, try mx12, ok it failed, continue until one succeeds.)
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Theo, I don't think connectivity is the issue -- I'm getting through to hotmail, they are just refusing to deliver. I can try to send to one of the "good" servers directly and see what happens. Thanks, Bill