Offsite mail clients unable to authenticate and get mail.

T

trazanka@mac.co

Registered
I have just installed 10.4.9 Server on a Mac Mini, I am no expert but I got most of the services running using a book on setting up server.

The problem I have is everyone on the local network can send and recieve mail no problem using IMAP or POP3 accounts and even Webmail works offsite,

But when someone is offsite like at home, they cannot authenticate and connect to the server to send mail, we use Apple mail but have even tried Thunderbird and Outlook on a PC. None will connect.

Currently we are using CRAM-MD5 for mail authentication.

Any suggestions of what might be causing this?

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
trazanka@mac.co said:
I have just installed 10.4.9 Server on a Mac Mini, I am no expert but I got most of the services running using a book on setting up server.

The problem I have is everyone on the local network can send and recieve mail no problem using IMAP or POP3 accounts and even Webmail works offsite,

But when someone is offsite like at home, they cannot authenticate and connect to the server to send mail, we use Apple mail but have even tried Thunderbird and Outlook on a PC. None will connect.

Currently we are using CRAM-MD5 for mail authentication.

Any suggestions of what might be causing this?

Thanks in advance for any help.
Click to expand...

Maybe your router / firewall does not forward the ports for imap and smtp to the mailserver, therefore the external request never reaches the mailserver. Check your router / firewall for that and if not set, forward the smtp and imap ports to the mailserver.


Good luck, Kees
 
Thanks for the suggestion Kees.

I had opened 20, 21, 22, 25, 110 and 143, any others I should have for IMAP, POP and SMTP?

Also I have found another strange issue, my MX record is mail.companyname.com but if I use that for my connection settings in Mail it tells me:

The server error encountered was: The server "mail.companyname.com" cannot be contacted on port 143.

But if I change it to server.companyname.com it can send and recieve email when I am onsite. Still does not work if I am offsite.

I tried a Windows XP machine running Outlook and neither configuration worked on it.

Any addition suggestions? Thanks
 
trazanka@mac.co said:
Thanks for the suggestion Kees.

I had opened 20, 21, 22, 25, 110 and 143, any others I should have for IMAP, POP and SMTP?
Click to expand...

Opening is something different from forwarding. Is the outside connection hooked up directly to the mailserver or is there something in between. In that case you have to redirect the port to the mailserver, how pends on the system, but in general you specifiy the port (143) and tells it to forward anything to the mailserver e.g. the computer with ip number 192.168.42.250.

The message related to the 143 port tells effectively that the mailserver is not seen from the outside world. most likely mail.... (internet ip-number 123.123.123.123) has a different ip-number from server.... (local ip like 192.168.42.250). This is not a big issue, might only cause a minor slowdown in retreiving mail.

Good luck, Kees
 
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