IT help required – SMTP email settings and BT Business internet

Can anyone help me out with a frustrating email problem I’m having?

I have just moved office and now having problems with outgoing email; I have a personal email account (Apple .mac) and business email account (vickerscreative.co.uk, professionally hosted) and a desktop mail client (Apple Mail app) set up as IMAP. Everything worked ok at the previous premises using PlusNet, but at the new premises with BT Business the Mail app can’t connect to the vickerscreative.co.uk outgoing email account using SMTP. The vickerscreative.co.uk incoming mail (IMAP) is ok, as is the Apple .mac email.

The SMTP settings are:
Server: mail.vickerscreative.co.uk
Ports: Default (25, 465, 587)
No SSL
Authentication type: Password

I’ve tried all the other authentication types (TLS certificate, Kerberos, NTLM & MD5) SSL/non-SSL, and a combination of all of them, none of which allow Mail to connect.

The strange thing is I can send email from the vickerscreative.co.uk account from my HTC smartphone using the same BT Business connection, just not from the desktop.

I think it’s something to do with the ports for the outgoing mail, but before I tackle the BT shunt to get some numbers out of them, I thought I would ask here for some wisdom.

Cheers, Lee

I doubt that it’s a BT problem. I would call the email host first to double check the settings.

You’ll need to either,

Use BT’s SMTP server,

Use authentication and possibly encryption on your vickers SMTP server and possibly contact BT to enable third party SMTP servers.

Cheers guys, that’s awesome. Will give BT a call this morning.

Cougar – why would I be able to send email from my phone using the same settings and connection as the desktop?

BT aren’t blocking SMTP usage from your phone? </speculation>

Have you tried using telnet to connect to your mail server? For example, from a command prompt,
telnet mail.vickerscreative.co.uk 25
will test and see at least if port 25 is blocked by BT. We use BT at work and at home, use our own and other smtp servers and have never had to use BTs SMTP servers. For me, your mail server responds on port 25 and 587 but not on 465. But if your not using ssl the surely port 25 alone should be sufficient.

Colin

BT aren’t blocking SMTP usage from your phone? </speculation>

Makes sense! 🙄

Gowrie, tried telnet to test the ports and both ended (finally) with a timeout error and “Connection closed by foreign host.”

Good luck getting BT to enable connection to 3rd party SMTP servers… I think you’ll need to use BT’s SMTP server details and your BT credentials to avoid hours of ‘fun’ with BT.

Good luck getting BT to enable connection to 3rd party SMTP servers… I think you’ll need to use BT’s SMTP server details and your BT credentials to avoid hours of ‘fun’ with BT.

That’s what I’m discovering! Seems crazy that BT Business internet connection doesn’t make it easy to connect to a privately hosted mail server…

I’m now trying a combination of mail servers and port number but so far no joy.

assuming that you’re using wireless for the mobile device and a wired connection for the desktop then there’s probably an inappropriately placed firewall blocking the port.

Hmm nope – connecting wirelessly both on the desktop (it’s actually a MacBook Pro) and smartphone…

I’ve checked my OS firewall and tried with it off – no difference.

Don’t waste your time. Get BT’s SMTP server details (something like smtp.bt.co.uk) and get them to issue you with a BT email address/log in credentials. Use these for your outgoing email settings in your email client (emails will still look like they’re from your vickers creative account). Trying to get a behemoth to change its policy is pointless.

I use Bt business broadband here and there is no block on port 25 for SMTP.

They do use weird Authentication on there own SMTP servers which can require connection through a bt connection but this should affect youe server hosted by another company.