A couple of customers called this week – they have their emails hosted with us, and are using our SMTP server to send. This usually means that wherever you are with your computer, as long as you have an internet connection you should be able to send emails – however, this week these two customers were having problems…
After some investigation on both computers, all the settings were correct and setting up test accounts on our system showed that our server was working. The only similarity between the two customers was they both had an Orange broadband account.
A quick search on the web shows that Orange have sometimes changed things about their system to try to combat spam, but this also means that legitimate emails are being blocked. I asked the customers to contact Orange to see if they could help. Orange replied that there was a problem (they didn’t expand on the details) and that the system would be back up and running in a few days.
A few days later… both customers can mysteriously send email again as if nothing had happened.
Exactly what had caused this? Possibly there was a technical problem with Orange’s service, maybe they blocked the ports used to send email; Orange haven’t told us the details, but it does show that sometimes, even though you are connected to the internet (websites appear and emails are received) this doesn’t always mean that the internet connection is not the cause of email problems!
If you are changing broadband suppliers, check:
That your new provider allows sending emails from ‘third party’ domains (for example myemail@mydomain.com)
If they do allow third party emails, is there a process to ‘authorise’ this email address to send? (Some ISPs have a number of hoops to jump through before they will allow this)
Which ports they allow for sending emails (sometimes ports are blocked to try to stop spammers)
I cannot ascess my emails as there is a key , when i try to get rid of ot ,it puts me to a place in America called Symartic, this has suddenly stopped me looking at my emails, I am thinking of leaving Orange as it has always had problems
Yours Peter Hanson
By: Mr P Hanson on 13/03/2011
at 12:56
We are in france on our yacht and bought an orange france dongle to access our emails and web sites. We are able to consistently access all web sites that we require. We use orange in the uk and our web email address is xxx. When we access orange..co.uk we can access the first page from which we can access our login details. We ok the details to receive our emails but after a couple of minutes we get the following error coming up “oops this link appears to be broken dns error occured server cannot be found”
We have been able to get our emails if we use wifi but this now seems to be giving us the same problem.
We used the facilities of an orange shop in France but they were unable to help.
It seems to us that orange.co.uk is blocking the sending to us of our emails.
The best initial access to us would be via our orange mobile phone xxxx but we will also try to access this site when possible.
By: john hearl on 18/06/2011
at 08:11
I hope you’re having a great time sailing, and that you’re not spending too much time worrying about your internet connection!
I’m afraid the problems you describe are difficult for me to resolve from this distance.
However, it is very possible that your emails are being blocked, because they may suspect you of being a spammer (i.e. hitching yourself to another ISP and then sending lots and lots of emails out).
I wasn’t sure from your description whether or not you can use the orange website to send / receive emails. Webmail is often the way around any such ISP blocks.
All I can recommend at this point is speaking with the people who manage your emails (which sounds like orange.co.uk) and tell them that you are travelling and that you need their help in resolving this.
The trouble is, if ISP at ‘fault’ is the one you are connecing to the Internet with, it may be difficult to resolve, especially as you’ve already been into an Orange France shop.
Good luck!
Cat Young
By: catyoung on 01/08/2011
at 08:14