Re: PC can no longer send email - no response from SMTP server

Martin Underwood wrote:

ric wrote in message
1185447882.856875.93750@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:


On Jul 25, 11:34 pm, "Lofty."
<NO...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Try posting your question in
microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6_outlookexpress"Mortimer"
<m...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:46a70eb1$0$1632$ed2619ec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




A customer has a Windows 2000 PC with the free version of AVG
installed. He does not have a software firewall (either third-party
or the Windows XP one). It is configured to send and receive email
using Outlook Express.

Everything has worked perfectly until recently when one PC cannot
send email any more, although it can still receive it. He is
getting OE's "cannot connect - timed out" message.

His other PCs, all configured with the same POP and SMTP servers and
the same SMTP-logon username and password, work fine. They all use
the same internet connection via a router.

I've established from OE's SMTP log and by doing "telnet smtp-server
25" that the SMTP server is not responding - when I connect to his
server using telnet I get a sign-on message from the server whereas
he doesn't.


To the OP: long shot,but check there's no firewall blocking it, no
hosts file blocking it, and nothing stupid like new.net rerouting the
DNS queries to their servers. Actually, have you checked the DNS
server entries are correct?


To the best of my knowledge and the customer's knowledge, there isn't a firewall - it's W2K rather than Win XP so there wouldn't be the Windows one. But I'd wondered about that: something blocking port 25. I didn't actually check the DNS situation. I'll get him to try telnetting to the IP address rather than domain name, to eliminate DNS problems. Also, DNS is working OK for the other PCs (I think one is W2K and one is XP) that connect using the router.

What is strange is that it was working fine and spontaneously stopped working.

I'll check the hosts file (*). What's new.net - where is this file and what does it do?


(*) The other day I cured another customer's inability to access his online bank from his PC, when I found that it had malicious host file entries for all the various banks, directing to an IP address that didn't show up in nslookup and wasn't pingable. Goodness knows what that address was!

Martin, just what is your area of expertise for your customers, as I have never figured it out :-)

Mine is case. mobo and getting the hardware to spin up and then installing an operating system. The rest is down to those that own the computer.

Dave
.

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