Sir, Madam,
I don't know who you are, but thank you very much for
helping me out. After all that work, it was your last,
and probably most simple, thing that I should have
checked. My firewall did not recognise Outlook after the
update. Now it does. It works, and I am grateful for
your assistance in helping out this numpty.
-----Original Message-----
"Tedrick" said in news:14ae501c414e1$58c57830
[email protected]:
"Unable to find the e-mail server"
You don't mention your version of Windows so I'll guess
you are using some NT-based flavor of Windows. I'm also
assuming you did a reboot after the Office update
although none was mentioned as being required. The
problem is that your computer cannot "find" the specified
mail servers.
See if you can connect to those mail servers. The point
is not to actually perform any commands to manage your e-
mail but simply to see if you can get into their mail
servers separately of your e-mail client program. Do the
following in a DOS shell (aka command prompt):
telnet pop.freeserve.com 110
telnet in.pandora.be 25
Just see if you can establish a session with their mail
server. If so then just enter 'quit' to end the session,
or hit Ctrl-C if it doesn't respond (or just close the
DOS shell). I was able to open a session with their POP3
server but not with their SMTP server (in.pandora.be).
This could be because they refuse off-domain connections
to their SMTP server to prevent abuse by spammers, or
they use a different port than the standard one of 25, or
they require SSL protocol for a secure connection.
If you cannot get a connection to the mail server host,
it could be that your computer cannot resolve the IP name
into an IP address. In a DOS shell, enter:
nslookup pop.freeserve.com
nslookup in.pandora.be
Can your computer get the DNS records for these IP names
(what you use) to resolve them to their IP addresses
(what the computer actually uses)? Your computer is
going nowhere without the IP addresses. If you don't
have nslookup then use ping; it may not find a responsive
server but the point here is that it should report back
the IP address for the IP name you specified.
If you can get the IP address then check if you have a
route to get to their servers. Run a traceroute:
tracert pop.freeserve.com
tracert in.pandora.be
Hopefully the trace gets all the way to the targeted
host. However, sometimes a border host will prevent any
further intrusion into a network but that host should be
in the same domain. For example, you might not be able
to get to the "in" host on the pandora.be domain but you
should get to some host on the pandora.be domain.
Unfortunately, that border host might not be assigned a
DNS record so you have to lookup the last reachable
host's IP address registration to see who owns it. The
following are some WhoIs sites to check who owns what IP
address:
ARIN (North America):
http://www.arin.net/tools/
APNIC (Asian Pacific):
http://www.apnic.net/
LACNIC (Latin American & Caribbean):
http://lacnic.net/cgi-bin/lacnic/whois?lg=EN
RIPE (European):
http://www.ripe.net/perl/whois
Each registratrar handles IP address allocations in its
area so you'll have to check with each one to see who has
the IP address registered. There are tools that will
query several WhoIs databases, like SamSpade.
If you have a firewall and anti-virus software, try
disabling them to see if you then get a connection. You
might also try running msconfig.exe to disable all
startup programs and reboot to see if something is
interferring with your e-mail connectivity.
