MS Exchange Mail Server Troubleshooting Tips: When Email Doesn’t Come in From the Web
This article will describe how an IT Administrator can easily troubleshoot a common problem: when emails don’t come in from the Web. We’ll show you how you can quickly test if the issue is related to your mail server, firewall, or DNS, allowing you to pinpoint the problem and get it fixed right away.
We recommend that you perform the following steps from outside your network.*\
Go to your command prompt and type in :
telnet mail.yourserver.com 25
Telnet
If your mail server is working, you’ll see a response like this:
Telnet Response
If you see a message such as “Connecting To mail.yoursever.com…Could not open connection to the host, on port 25”, this could indicate that your SMTP service is down, your firewall is blocking the port, or the IP address that was resolved to an IP may be incorrect.
If this is the case, in the command prompt, try pinging the hostname you specified in the telnet command and verify the IP address to make sure it is correcting to the right server.
Ping the Hostname
If you are unable to establish an SMTP connection from outside the network, try to use the same telnet command to connect to your mail server directly from within your network using the direct internal IP address to the server.
Use an Internal IP Address
If you get the SMT Banner right away then you know that the server is listening correctly and that firewall or DNS issues are preventing the connection from outside.
* Note: Some Firewalls do not allow telnet connection on SMTP ports directly, such as some Cisco PIX firewalls. In this case your only solution is to do this from inside your network.
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