Re: Email from Home

In the message "[Micronet] Email from Home", dated 2005-03-03,
Charles E. James wrote:

>The Associate Director from our department (and others) has been
>trying to use here email from home. She can receive email but can
>not send. We have checked her settings in Eudora (she uses the same
>laptop both at home and work) and all seems well. When she gets into
>work all the mail she tried to send from home goes out normally.

   If this problem began occurring right after she configured her
email program to connect securely to CalMail, some of the most likely
causes, and their fixes or workarounds, are:

   1. She is connecting to the Internet via a commercial ISP, and
      that ISP has blocked outgoing traffic on port 25 (SMTP), except
      to the ISP's own mail servers.

      (This possibility was suggested by my colleague, Ian Crew, in
      an earlier note to Micronet, and some of the fixes/workarounds
      below are from Ian's, Kevin Barney's, and Bernie Tower's
      responses to that list. as well as

   2. She has a Norton or Symantec anti-virus program active on her
      system, with its email scanning option enabled. This is
      blocking the transmission of encrypted messages on port 25.

   3. She hasn't yet fully enabled SSL/TLS encryption, or SMTP AUTH
      authentication, or both in her email program.

   4. Her outgoing email server (SMTP) hostname isn't *exactly*
      "calmail.berkeley.edu".

   Details below. This information - in its current, unedited state -
is now available in a draft CalMail Knowledge Base article,
<http://kb.berkeley.edu/kb352>. We'll endeavor to clean it up and
make it more user friendly in the very near future.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

P.S. Thanks to Ian Crew, Kevin Barney, Bernie Tower, and Karl Grose,
among others, for some of the information below.

--
   Why can't I send mail after setting up my email program to securely
   connect to CalMail?
   1. You are connecting to the Internet via a commercial Internet
      service provider (ISP), and as a security measure to help prevent
      spam, that ISP has blocked outgoing traffic on port 25 (SMTP),
      except to the ISP's own mail servers.
      As a result of your configuration changes, your email program
      is now trying to send email securely to port 25 on CalMail,
      and your ISP is blocking this traffic.
      The most general workaround is to configure your email
      program to securely send mail to port 465 on CalMail.  Most
      email programs allow you to manually change the port number
      for sending mail; simply changing the port from 25 to 465
      should resolve this problem.
      Alternative workarounds include:
      - Configuring your email program to securely send mail via CalMail
        on the Submission port, port 587.  This is the preferred solution,
        from an Internet standards perspective.
        However, Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express don't support
        secure connections on that port, so that isn't an option if you're
        using one of those programs.  And changing to use that port in
        this in at least some versions/platforms of Eudora can be somewhat
        challenging.
        (The campus installer for Eudora 6.2.x for Windows, available
        from the WSSG Software website, <http://software.berkeley.edu>,
        does, from what I understand, default to sending mail on port 587
        for new installations of Eudora.)
      - Asking your ISP to remove its filtering or blocking on port 25
        for her account.  For SBC/Yahoo! users, information on doing so
        is at:
           http://help.sbcglobal.net/servabuse.php
      - Configuring your email program to once again send
        mail via the ISP's own mail server.  This involves:
        o Changing the hostname for the outgoing mail server
          (SMTP server) to the mail server required by your ISP
          (check their support pages on their website for details.)
        o Depending on your ISP, doing this may also require:
          - Turning off SSL/TLS encryption; and
          - Making sure that outgoing mail is sent via port 25;
            and possibly also
          - Turning off SMTP AUTH authentication
        when sending mail, in your email program's settings.
      - Installing and using the campus-licensed VPN software,
        which is also available from the WSSG Software website,
        above.
        This may or may not be appropriate for an unmanaged home
        system; it may depend on the user's experience level.
---------------------------------------------------------------
   2. You have a Norton or Symantec anti-virus program active on your
      system, with its email scanning option enabled.  This is
      blocking the transmission of encrypted messages on port 25.
      Please see the following CalMail Knowledge Base article
      for details about how to turn off email scanning, which
      resolves this problem:
      http://kb.berkeley.edu/kb348
      Note: changing the port on which outgoing mail is sent
      to CalMail to 465 will also work around this problem, even
      if email scanning isn't turned off.
---------------------------------------------------------------
   3. You haven't yet fully enabled SSL/TLS encryption, or SMTP AUTH
      authentication, or both, in your email program.
      To do so, please once again go through the instructions
      on configuring secure connections to CalMail in your
      email program, by selecting the appropriate document from
      the links at:
        http://bert.berkeley.edu/calmail/help/secure/index.html
        or
        http://kb.berkeley.edu/kb400
      Please go once again through every step in these documents,
      and verify each of the settings mentioned there.
---------------------------------------------------------------
   4. Your outgoing email server hostname isn't *exactly*
      "calmail.berkeley.edu" (without the quotes).
      To do so, please once again go through the instructions
      on configuring secure connections to CalMail in your
      email program, by selecting the appropriate document from
      the links at:
        http://bert.berkeley.edu/calmail/help/secure/index.html
        or
        http://kb.berkeley.edu/kb400
      Please go once again through every step in these documents,
      and verify each of the settings mentioned there.
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