Help E-mail woes

[Lol999]

Having a complete nightmare with my Nexus/K9 combo trying to send emails via my domain email on 3 network.
I have my own domain, gentlethoughts.co.uk. I've set up mailbox, and if I send mail by wifi from my phone it works. However, if I try to send it via my phone connnection, I get the Spamhaus 550 message.
I've looked at the IP address it says is blocked, it's also the IP address of Hutchinson 3G.
My domain is hosted with Powered by Penguins.

In K9, I have entered the proper server settings, and these obviously work since it works on wifi, so I don't know what the hell to do! I need to be able to send emails on the move as it's for my business.

Any thoughts please?

BTW, "Powered by" have no idea,

 

[John Bean]

Is the mail server provided by your hosting company or are you running it on your local network? Many ISP's (including 3) won't allow mail from servers hosted on IP ranges associated with consumer broadband connections.

Another possibility is that you're trying to use port 25 - which 3 doesn't allow for external servers with a few minor exceptions. Instead try port 587 (preferred) or port 465 instead.

Finally it is possible that if a server IP doesn't match its name - in other words a reverse DNS of its IP address returns a completely different domain name from the one that it claims - some ISPs won't allow its use as a "smarthost" for sending mail. In your case, gentlethoughts.co.uk currently resolves to 79.170.44.91 but a reverse DNS on that IP address tells us its name is really web91.extendcp.co.uk. This may be why 3 is refusing to allow its use a smarthost.

If all else fails my advice would be to use 3's SMTP server to send email from your phone, setting your email client to use your xxxx@gentlethoughts.co.uk email address in the "from:" and "reply-to:" fields. That way it keeps 3 happy and to the recipient it looks just the same.

 

[Lol999]

Hi John and thanks for the reply.
The mail server is provided by the host company so no consumer broadband issues.
I'm using port 587 as standard.
It could be the reverse dns issue you mention. I had similar problems with Tesco (O2), are they the same?

Cheers, Lol

 

[John Bean]

Sounds like an issue with your host's mailserver that has been flagged as a potential threat by the mobile operators - the "threat" is usually a matter of bad security against illicit use by spammers.

I use gmail these days but I had lots of similar issues trying to use smtp servers on hosted domains. Best to use smtp.three.co.uk while you're on their network; no authentication needed if you're on the 3 network, it "just works" - or at least it did last time I used it.

 

[Lol999]

Thanks John, it looks like I might be having to go back to a gmail account for my business once this last lot of business cards are used up!

 

[John Bean]

You can use gmail to collect and forward any other email accounts so they all appear in your gmail inbox. You can even set it up to use the reply addresses of the forwarded mail so it looks as though it came from the same forwarded email address when you reply.

I was going to try to explain how to do it but of course someone has already written a nice illustrated guide to save me the trouble

Obviously ignore the actual server names used in the guide, they refer to the servers belonging to the ISP who provided it; for outgoing mail you can use smtp.gmail.com.

Much better than fighting with blocked SMTP ports.