Blown PC Update #3

The new PC reared its head again this evening. Not surprising really as I hadn’t managed to configure an email client before it was whisked back up the motorway. So I expected the usual trouble with setting up an email account to work with Windows Live Mail. What I didn’t count on was a whole new learning experience!

The user had downloaded Windows Live Mail and installed it, great. But no email was coming through, no surprise there then. So I enquired for the email address so that I could look up the POP and SMTP settings for their account, easy, or so I thought. The email address was and old user@user.fsnet.co.uk address. Now here’s where things got tricky. I didn’t find out exactly what the order of events was, but fsnet started off as Wanadoo and that started off as Freeserve and whole lot now belongs to Orange. So a quick search around the web provided me with the Orange POP and SMTP addresses, pop.orangehome.co.uk and smtp.orangehome.co.uk. Sorted, or so I thought.

So I walk the user through the account setup process on Windows Live Mail. They hit the sync button and hey presto email arrives in the account and the folders are replicated, hurrah! My joy was short lived, outgoing email fails. Mmmmm tricky, so we go round in circles checking the account information and everything looks fine. So I spend the next hour on the web searching for a solution. Its then you heart sinks as you realise it’s a problem lots of people have, and there’s no sign of solution. With a headache coming on I give up after an hour. However, later on I get an email from the user saying everything was OK. This is followed by a phone call to say it’s not working again now.

This is odd, how can it sort of work? It should either work 100% or not at all. So I do some more research and its then I find out all about ‘Port 25’ blocking of many of the ISP’s we use. This means that if you have Orange as your ISP, you must have an @orange email account or the server will block your email! Apparently this is to stop virus infected computers spewing spam out into the internet through Port 25, all well and good, but you are in trouble if your ISP doesn’t always match your email address like we have here. So here’s the rub, why did it all work OK before the blown PC? The email setup must have been using either a different SMTP server or a different port on the Orangehome server. Neither of which I can find details of on the web. So there’s only one thing for it. I will have to pop (no pun intended) the old hard drive back into my Linux machine and have a look. There are other ways to sort this out but I’ll try this first.