Basic Troubleshooting:

If you are having trouble sending or receiving E-Mail, please double-check all your settings. (Server Settings, Software Settings)

The most common problem with receiving e-Mail is using your username instead of your full mailbox name. When configuring E-mail software on your PC, it usually asks for a username. Be sure and enter your full mailbox name and not just your username. For example, if your public E-Mail address is bob@ourweb.com, then your mailbox name, for use with your own E-Mail software only, is bob%ourweb.com

If you are technically experienced, the following advanced information will help you diagnose your E-Mail configuration by isolating whether the difficulty is within your software configuration or the server.

Advanced Troubleshooting:

Internet E-Mail is based on open standards. The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) is the industry standards body that creates and ratifies all the Internet protocols. The relevent standards are called RFC's ("request for comments") and have numerical indentifiers such as RFC-xxx. (The actual RFC details are beyond the scope of this intermediate tutorial. If you are interested, the actual RFC's are available online.)

The two mostly widely used E-Mail protocols are POP3 (Post Office Protocol Version 3) and SMTP (simple message transfer protocol). Unknown to most people, these are very simple ASCII protocols - not binary packets with bit-stuffed fields as many protocols tend to be. All E-Mail traffic actually flows as ASCII command lines, prompts, and replies transmitted through a TELNET terminal session.

The only "trick" is that the TELNET sessions use special port number instead of the default TELNET ports. POP3 uses TELNET port 110, and SMTP uses TELNET port 25.

What does this all mean? Well, quite simply, using only a TELNET program on your end you can send and receive Internet E-Mail. Although this would be quite tedious to do all the time, it makes diagnosing E-Mail problems very easy. A simple, DOS commandline TELNET program is included standard with both Windows'95/98 and Windows NT and shareware TELNET programs are widely available for Macintosh and other platforms. The advantage of using a TELNET program is that you can test your E-Mail capability without relying on any software in your computer. This is a great way to quickly determine whether the software program or the E-Mail server or the Internet itself is the cause of the problem.

The following examples show how you can initiate a TELNET session to read your E-Mail (POP3) or to send E-Mail (SMTP). This is not meant as a tutorial, but if you are familiar with commandline programs you should be able to follow this and try it on your system. Please don't ask us for help! At the risk of sounding a bit condescending, if you don't understand this stuff then you probably shouldn't be trying to do it.

Test POP3 E-mail access using command line:

telnet mail.domainname.com 110
USER mailboxname%domainname.com
PASS password
QUIT

STAT
LIST [msgnumber]
RETR msgnumber
DELE msgnumber
NOOP
RSET
QUIT

APOP name digest
TOP msgnumber n
UIDL msgnumber
QUIT

 

Test SMTP E-mail transmission using command line:

telnet smtp.yourdomain.com 25
EHLO yourdomain.com
MAIL FROM: <someone@anotherdomain.com>
RCPT TO: <yourname@yourdomain.com>
DATA
To: yourname@yourdomain.com
Subject: Type Message Subject Here
This is the text of the message - first line
This is the text of the message - second line
<cr>
.
<cr>
QUIT

(End the text of message with three lines consisting of carriage return, period, and carriage return)