Trouble sending email

[Craig White]

Rick Rosinski wrote:
> 
> James,
> 
> I try over and over again, resending the same message through the outbox.  I
> called customer suppport, and they gave me a new dial-up number, saying that
> the old number wouldn't allow people to send email.  That didn't work.  He
> told me to keep mail.mindspring.com since I am a mindspring subscriber.  I
> receive mail just fine, but I can't send the mail no matter what.  I tried
> many combinations of smtp - smtp.mindspring.com, mail.smtp.mindspring.com,
> smtp.mail.mindspring.com, smtp.earthlink.net, mail.earthlink.net, every damn
> thing.
> 
> Any more ideas?
> 
----------
New phone numbers etc are nice but will never get you to the bottom of
the problem. And - /etc/resolv.conf is probably re-written by your kppp
login.

So the first thing to do is to connect as you normally do.

Then try "nslookup smtp.earthlink.net" and see what it returns - does it
return an error or an ip address?

Then try "ping -c 4 smtp.earthlink.net" and see what it returns - does
it timeout or does it get a response?

The thinking is in the first case, can your connection resolve the
hostname smtp.earthlink.net - if not, then step 2 will fail. If so, then
if step 2 fails, it is a routing issue that earthlink/mindspring must
fix.

Substitute "mail.mindspring.com" for "smtp.earthlink.net" above and see
what happens.

When you are done with these two things, type "cat /etc/resolv.conf" and
post the results of all this and we will know what your problem is.

My guess is that your KPPP dial-up isn't fixing the /etc/resolv.conf
properly - permissions problem perhaps?

Craig