[ILUG] Followup 3: Naive ADSL/WiFi questions [ cannot send e-mail ]

[Thomas Pedoussaut]

Brian Foster wrote:
>  finally found a use for my gmail account ...
>  (and thank whatevers for Firefox's mozex plugin!)
>
>  whee!  I've got ADSL access to the internet now,
>  guess I'm no longer in the 19th ;-) century!
>  everything seems to be working fine, with one
>  Highly Annoying exception:  sending e-mail.
>
>  the instructions say to use  smtp.te-dns.net
>  as the SMTP server (and do not mention anything
>  about authentication).   my first attempt was to
>  for my local SMTP server (postfix) to relay (same
>  as I was doing over the 56K dialout straw), but
>  that is refused (from the log):
>
>      550 relay not permitted (in reply to RCPT TO command)
>   

Are you using the provided dns servers or your own one ? There is a 
major Internet provider in France that used to have this funny game of 
split horizon. For external DNS queries smtp.provider.net was returning 
the IPs of the MX, and for queries to their resolvers, it was returning 
the IPs of the mail relay (outgoing).

/my 2 cents.

>  hum ...
>
>  Ok, before messing about with local SMTP any more,
>  I decided to configure Kmail to send directly to
>  that server rather than via my local server (i.e.,
>  mimic the ISP's instructions, which are just for
>  M$ Windross Outofluck).  that's still no good,
>  it's refused in the same(?) way (from the pop-up
>  Kmail error window):
>
>     Sending failed:
>     Message sending failed since the following recipients
>     were rejected by the server:  xxx at yyy
>     (The server responded: "relay not permitted")
>
>  hum! ....
>
>  trying with a guess at authentication results in
>  a slightly different but perhaps expected error:
>
>     Sending failed:
>     Your SMTP server doesn't support authentication.
>     The server responded: "AUTH command used when not advertised"
>
>  arrggghhhh!!!!!  now what?
>  (the firewall was up during all the above tests, but
>  I rather doubt that has anything to do the problem.)
>
>  I'm afraid e-mail/SMTP is a complete mystery to me.
>  any ideas?  what should try?  test?
>
>  I haven't yet called support, mostly since it's only
>  for M$ Windross, so things could get a bit confused.
>
> cheers!
> 	-blf-
>