It's been a couple of years, and while I don't remember the exact details of it, I
do distinctly remember that placing my ISP's mailserver address there simply did not work. I could send out mails like that via my old dial-up ISP, but could not send them out through my then new high-speed internet service. I can't remember if they simply bounced all such outgoing mails, refused the connection on them, or what, I just remember that the mails weren't allowed to go through.
And I remember that I called up the technical support line at my high-speed internet service, and they told me that I wasn't
supposed to be able to send out mails that didn't have their own domain name in the headers. My guess is, they were afraid of spammers misusing their service by sending out tons of mails with forged headers or something.
At that, I get the impression that there's something different about connecting via a dial-up connection vs connecting via a high-speed connection, from the perspective of the respective ISPs, that by connecting via dial-up, your connection to send outgoing mails is somehow deemed "more likely to be legit/you" than someone over high-speed internet doing the same kind of internet action. I guess there's some sort of authentication that comes of merely being on a dial-up connection that makes them more confident I'm legit to be sending these mails...
My domain name used to be hosted through my old, dial-up ISP, but I didn't have a website through them, just the ability to have mails going to and from that domain name through them. I moved my domain to a webspace provider, but kept the old dial-up service in the interrum because some mail still came in through there for awhile... and then I discovered I could, in a pinch, still send out all my mails through them, but only if I was dialed into them via telephone modem... so I did that as a stopgap while trying to get the matter resolved with my high-speed internet company, but they (the new ISP) refused to play ball.
Eventually I figured out I could just have SME function as the outgoing mailer itself, sending the mails directly to the recipient's email server, without having to deal with SMTP authentication at my ISP, and that most recipient mail servers out there just accepted my mails as a matter of course. Clearly, this has now changed.
As far as Yahoo allegedly just dropping all such mails into a bit-bucket -- that is, quietly "eating" the mails
without telling the sending agent that -- is just beyond improper. A person could be sending out a mission-critical piece of information to someone that they only once in a blue moon communicate with, and it just happens that that person has a Yahoo email addy... they'll have no way of knowing that Yahoo recently changed how they handle mails from places like mine and that that mail never got to the intended recipient! In fact, if the sender subsequently asks that user, and that user states he never got the mail, the sender
might think "Well, he
must by lying, because it sure as shootin' didn't
bounce!"
(And yes, I checked the spam folder at my Yahoo account, the test mails weren't there either.)
Nevertheless, the issue with Yahoo bit-bucketing the mails is more than likely semi-related to the above "...sender was rejected" issue, they just chose to handle it in a
deceitful manner, presumably under the misguided feeling that, "Well, we just aren't going to give those despicable, dirty-rotten spammers ANY useful information, such as by giving them an
error message back, which would tell them
how -- or even
that -- their fraudulent, totally-garbage mails are getting rejected....!
Grumblerummblegrowllllfume... [cartoon cussing...]"
And BTW, my internet connection
is a dynamic IP,
not a static one.
I suppose I could try entering my ISP's SMTP server into SME once more (once I can find out what it is again) to see if maybe they changed their policy, but more than likely outgoing mails will just be rejected again.
edit: Is there a simple way to find out what my ISP's outgoing SMTP server is? Say, a simple command from the Windows command prompt directed at their main domain name?
edit,edit: Nevermind, I found it in their FAQs... It's mail.[TheirDomainNameRedacted].net for both POP and SMTP, and in their pictorial instructions for how to set up Microsoft Outlook (strange that they don't have instructions for Thunderbird), under outgoing mail on the Internet Email Settings pane, Outgoing Server tab, they show
My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication checkboxed and
Log onto incoming mail server before sending mail uncheckboxed, and they have selected
Log On using, with Username and Password set to the email address and password given to me by my ISP . So how do I set the equivalent for SME from within Server-Manager?
edit: Well, I went ahead and changed the appropriate settings. Went to
Server-Manager > Email, punched [Change email delivery settings] and configured it to send to my ISP's SMTP server, with authentication turned on, and set to my general email account there, with its respective password below, and
now sending mails from one of my email addresses at my domain now gets through to my Yahoo mailbox
and to my hotmail box. Will try a test message to my yahoogroups list next...
edit: As I was posting the above edit, a test message I sent on the 13th to my Yahoo box arrived, too. Guess it was sitting in the queue all this time, with Yahoo refusing the connection...
The message sent to the list earlier didn't show, though. A new test mail to the list did, and so I forwarded the previous message from in my Sent folder.
I guess everything is as it should be now...
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