[NTLUG:Discuss] OT general email server question

[Preston Hagar]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Fred James <fredjame at fredjame.cnc.net> wrote:
> All
> For a large portion of today my ISP's email service was nonfunctional - not
> sending/receiving
> The error message, after asking for the password, was that the "server
> responded: authorization failed."
> Is it correct to assume that the message was generated by my ISP's
> equipment, or could it be a generic message from my email client?
> Thank you
> Regards
> Fred James
>
> Additional detail:
>   I have two email services ... my local ISP (A) and another ISP (B) ...
>      A is set on my email client as the outgoing service
>      A and B are each set as their own incoming service (of course)
>   During the outage ...
>      A could not send or receive
>      B could both send and receive - even though it uses A to send
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

My guess would be it is the ISP's issue, but it is hard to say.  A
good thing to try when you are having these outages is to test your
pop or imap and smtp connections with telnet.  You can just google for
test pop with telnet to get instructions.  Here are some for
unencrypted pop:

http://www.anta.net/misc/telnet-troubleshooting/pop.shtml

Anyway, if you can still log in via telnet, then it is your client.
If you can't, then it is their server.

That said, I would highly recommend against ever using an ISP's email
service.  What happens if you move?  What happens if your neighborhood
gets Fios, or the cable company has a great deal that beats out your
DSL?  If you are using your ISP's email service, then if you Internet
changes for any reason, you lose your email address and have to go
through the pain of notifiying everyone of your new email address.
Also, ISPs tend to have tiny Inbox size limits (not sure about yours).
 If you are using IMAP, or Pop and leaving messages on the server, you
can easily and quickly fill it up and stop receiving emails with
little to no feedback.

I generally recommend switching to either a free account at Google or
Yahoo (I personally prefer Google), or you can even get email with
your own domain name.  If you use the free version of Google Apps for
Domains, you get free email hosting, with 7 GB per account space, 25
accounts, IMAP, POP, and SMTP, as well as pretty nice webmail access.
If Google ever changes their terms, or cancels the service, you own
your domain name and can just find new hosting.  You email address
stays the same and no one will even know that you changed hosting
providers.

Sorry to get off on a tangent about ISP email, it just seems that the
extra freebie that the ISPs add on tends to cause more greif than it
is worth.

Just my 2 cents.

Preston