SMTP problem with KMail & new isp

Hey Mark, there could be a couple things to check.

The first possibility is the firewall on Mepis is preventing the connection.

The second is that your ISP is using different ports for email security. Check your ISP's help page and see if they mention the ports needed for sending and receiving email. Also check to see if they use TLS for security.

Post the info back here and we can see about modifying either kmail or guarddog

Jon

Jon,

Thanks for your reply. I tried disabling guarddog and sending a message and that had no effect. I did not logogg/on or reboot the computer because I didn't think it was necessary.

I checked with the isp (which is frontiernet - a phone company in upstate new york) and they recommend port 25 with their smtp service. They recommend no encryption and plain login. So these are the settings I've been using. I did try enabling login under authenticaion method because someone else on this forum with a related problem had luck doing that. It didn't help me.

Also, the little dance I did turning the authentication on and off was a red herring. If I try to send a message often enough, eventually it will go but that is obviously not the desired method.

Mark

Hi Mark,

Sorry to hear it's still not working reliably. I'm assuming that you were using kmail before the switch of ISPs and that it worked ok?

What type of DSL modem are you using? There have been quite a few posts recently about some of the DSL modems not working correctly. I don't remember the details at the moment and would have to check.

And the ports that are being used are straight-forward smtp so that's probably not the problem. What's strange is the infrequency of it. You say it does work sometimes?? Other than email send/receive, how about other Internet activity? Can you get onto the 'net reliably or does it act strange too? The reason I ask is that I want to lean in the direction of some hardware: either the modem, the wire to your 'puter from the modem, the wire from the modem to the wall, outside the wall...

How sure are you that all of that hardware is "OK"?

Jon

Jon,

A few new tid bits. I did my 6.0 install from an iso I downloaded and in at least one other instance (CUPS) until I uninstalled and reloaded (same version) through synaptic I couldn't get it to work reliably for network printing although it handled other tasks reliably. So I tried this with kmail. As of this minute there is one file that I am not getting to download from the repositories with synaptic and that is keeping the whole she-bang from installing. Hopefully I'll get this taken care of later tonight and get a version of kmail back up and running.

Meanwhile I installed Thunderbird and it works like a charm. Konqueror, Firebird, and gFTP all worked out of the box as well.

I have a fair bit invested in getting the KDE Kontact suite loaded up with info but other than that am not married to KMail. I don't know that thunderbird is my next be choice it just happened to be handy.

As to your question about the hardware other than what I've experienced, I'm not experienced enough to do any probing through software to know.

Thanks,
Mark

Hmm, well I don't know what else to suggest at this time. Just so that I'd have more to reference I started up kmail on my 6.0 laptop and put one of my email accounts on it. I was actually starting to research the fetchmail function that I used in the recent past. But as it relates to your issues, I had no problems

Let me know how it goes on loading the packages that you can't get loaded. What package is it and what messages are you getting?

Jon

Jon,

I got kmail reinstalled and it behaves the same. The problem there was synaptic was timing out on the download of a particular not very large file and without it couldn't complete the install. Oddly it downloaded much larger files routinely - as this took a couple of tries - with no difficulty. Anyway, I eventually got it. This makes me think that something in the upload side of my internet connection is not as it should be. I just checked the download speed and it came in at 365K which should be enough to spool out e-mail messages. The download speed was about 3M.

Mark

Hi Mark,

You mentioned in your first post that some people have had success with static IPs. Although I don't recommend it as a permanent solution, can you talk with the tech support folks at your ISP and see if you can "borrow" a static address? Tell them that you're having difficulties getting your email client to work. Unless you get a really helpful person, they probably won't want to hear anything about "Linux", but maybe, just maybe they will allow you to try a static IP for a moment. If you can switch your system to use that IP (and your routing info too) and it works, then we have a clue as to the problem.

I'm not real confident

I keep thinking it has to do with DNS resolution. Have you checked your /etc/resolv.conf file and does it have the DNS addresses that your ISP is using? Does your /etc/hosts file have entries for your system? If you get the IP address for your ISP (do an "nslookup mail.your.isps.name") and put it into your /etc/hosts file, do things work better?

Jon

Jon,

Thanks for the suggestions. Before I call the isp if I could bug you for a little more information about switching my system and the routing tool it would be helpful. For sake of arguement lets say they let me do this and I get an IP address from them. Do I enter it into the eth0 configuration after selecting static IP? Do I need to worry about the dns address or can it remain as dhcp assigned? The router tool I'm not clear on at all? Any help would be appreciated.

I did look at the etc/hosts file and did do the nslook up and made those changes. I did stop the eth0 service and restarted it, but I did not logoff/on or reboot. No luck. I have copied in several of the relevant files for you to look at. The way these interact with one another I'm not completely clear about.

Thanks Mark

etc/hosts -the second line here, begins 66.133 I added

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost mepis1 mepis1.example.dom
66.133.129.10 relay.frontiernet.net

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
# (added automatically by netbase upgrade)

::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

etc/resolv.conf the IP addresses that get assigned to eth0 are generally 192.168.254.x, urrently x=2

search domain.invalid
nameserver 192.168.254.254
nameserver 192.168.254.254

etc/hosts.allow

# /etc/hosts.allow: list of hosts that are allowed to access the system.
# See the manual pages hosts_access(5), hosts_options(5)
# and /usr/doc/netbase/portmapper.txt.gz
#
# Example: ALL: LOCAL @some_netgroup
# ALL: .foobar.edu EXCEPT terminalserver.foobar.edu
#
# If you're going to protect the portmapper use the name "portmap" for the
# daemon name. Remember that you can only use the keyword "ALL" and IP
# addresses (NOT host or domain names) for the portmapper. See portmap(
# and /usr/doc/netbase/portmapper.txt.gz for further information.
#

#ALL : 127.0.0.1 LOCAL : ALLOW
#ALL : ALL@ALL : DENY

etc/hosts.deny

# /etc/hosts.deny: list of hosts that are _not_ allowed to access the system.
# See the manual pages hosts_access(5), hosts_options(5)
# and /usr/doc/netbase/portmapper.txt.gz
#
# Example: ALL: some.host.name, .some.domain
# ALL EXCEPT in.fingerd: other.host.name, .other.domain
#
# If you're going to protect the portmapper use the name "portmap" for the
# daemon name. Remember that you can only use the keyword "ALL" and IP
# addresses (NOT host or domain names) for the portmapper. See portmap(
# and /usr/doc/netbase/portmapper.txt.gz for further information.
#
# The PARANOID wildcard matches any host whose name does not match its
# address.
ALL: PARANOID

Thanks Mark for more information.

Yes, you can have a static IP address and still use dhcp to get the DNS addresses, but that's almost backwards

The typical thing is to use dhcp to get your address and dhcp to give you the DNS addresses to but the dns addresses tend to be static. I did some searching on frontiernet.net and found these links that might be helpful (if you didn't read them yet):
frontier.myway.com > FAQ
http://myway.faq.frontiernet.net/faq_questions.asp

This one documents the current dns IP addresses for different areas:
frontier.myway.com > FAQ Answers
http://myway.faq.frontiernet.net/faq_answer.asp?q=143

What I find interesting is that the /etc/resolv.conf entries that you are showing are local addresses. The 192.168.x.y addresses are not routable through the Internet. So that tells me that you are either pointing to another system behind your firewall, or you are pointing to your router, that's also serving as your DNS server?

If you are not doing the above, try changing /etc/resolv.conf to point to the valid dns addresses for your area. You can then restart your network as user root from a konsole by entering "/etc/init.d/networking restart".

If you are making these changes from within the Mepis control Center, then make sure you press Apply before you go to a different tab. If you do not do that, then the change will not "take".

Jon

Jon,

I tried going to the static dns address they suggest, but do not recommend. This seems to have done the trick. I really appreciate your patience with me on this - and sorry I was away for a while since your last post. I did some reading on resolv.conf and what I might want to put in it, and am not clear on what address gets put after the nameserver entry. Also it seemed that this file wasn't required if you had a hosts file. Finally, I don't seem to have a dhcpd.conf file, at least i's not in etc/. I would have thought this file was necessary.

But the good news is the mail is spooling right out.

Thanks again, Mark

Thanks for the update Mark. Glad things are working.

Host name resolution is a fun topic and I certainly am not an expert. But here's what I can tell you. The /etc/hosts file is really intended for fairly small, local networks of machines. Back in the mists of time, it was the ONLY way that computers could find each other. That required VERY LARGE hosts files.

For your purposes, you don't really have to be running your own local DNS, especially if you move your laptop from work, to home, to the cafe.... The contents of the /etc/resolv.conf file boils down to essentially this:

# cat /etc/resolv.conf
search your.local.domain
nameserver 1.2.3.4
nameserver 4.5.6.7
nameserver 7.8.9.10

Where your.local.domain is the name of your local (internal) network, or possibly your ISP's name. So if you were using AOL (eew), then it would be "search aol.com". What that does is, if your box's host name is mymepis, doing an "nslookup mymepis" would first attempt to find "mymepis.aol.com" and return an address.

The three nameserver entries are the primary (1.2.3.4), secondary (4.5.6.7) and possibly tertiary (7.8.9.10) nameservers. If you do have the names of some of your local boxes in your local /etc/hosts file, you can add "127.0.0.1" as the first or last nameserver. That will cause DNS to search your system first (or last) to find a computer name and resolve it to an address.

I always recommend making a copy of this file before you change things, and then restart your network if you do change it. Then try looking up some known entities inside, and outside your local network.

If you need any more help, let us know

Jon