Unable to connect port 25 or 110 with win XP

[marloo]

Hi there,
I do technical support for a cable ISP. Since few days we receive many complaints from users unable to send or to receive mail.

When I ask them to manually connect to the mail server (telnet mail.mydomain.com 25) they get a refused connection or just receive no text in their telnet window, but they can ping the mail server. I also tried with third party servers, and the same thing occurs.

The only common point I noticed is that all complaints come from users using Win XP, the problem seems not to affect other platforms.

Does anybody have an idea to find and answer?

 

[jpm121]

Is the ISP blocking port 25 requests outside their own domain? They certainly should be, as no residential customer has any reason to access port 25 on an external server.

In other words, a user with Earthlink as their ISP should be able to connect to mail.earthlink.net, but no other port 25 connections are allowed.

 

[marloo]

thanks JPM121,

Port 25 is not blocked at server-side. We Cannot.

But you're right, relay on our SMTP is not allowed. That means that the server will only accept messages coming from other providers if they are destinated to our users, but only our users (filtered by IP adresses) can send e-mail to the rest of the world.

Marloo

 

[marloo]

And we do not block our users if they want to access any SMTP server outside our domain.

Marloo