This problem in general is one of most difficult to troubleshoot because the error could be in any number of places (or a combination of them all)
Some tips on resolving it:
1. Change between port 25 and 50 (if you're using one go back to the other).
This is helpful sometimes because changing the port changes the nature of the connection that you're making with your outbound mailserver on our network. Port 50 is an abnormal port that HMS has mapped as an 'extra' SMTP port specifically for this purpose, so this trick will not work on other webhosts. Also, many ISP's are starting to block port 25 altogether, so you may find it necessary to use 50 in order to make a connection at all.
2. Change the outgoing mailserver setting.
There are 3 possible settings for your outgoing mailserver with HMS:
- mail.domainname.xyz
- mailXX.safesecureweb.com (where XX is an integer between one and thirtysomething - this changes from account to account so check your setup email to find out what server to use)
- xxx.xx.xx.x (your mailserver's IP address)
In addition you may be using a 'nospamweb.com' domain - if so that's not a problem but that system is being phased out with the conversion to Smartermail so you should go ahead and change that to the appropriate 'safesecureweb.com' address.
In general all three of these should work, however if given the choice use the IP address for your mailserver since that doesn't rely on DNS in order to make a connection. If that doesn't make sense then don't worry - DNS resolution is another topic altogether and I'd rather not confuse this post anymore than necessary.
3. If your connection is irratic then it's possible that either your internet connection is spotty or the mailserver in question is having problems. I'll tackle those one at a time
a. Spotty internet
A good way to troubleshoot this is to see if you can perform a tracert to your mailserver, and what kind of results you get when you do so. If you're not familiar with the tracert command, you can see an article on how to use it here:
http://hostmysite.com/support/info/tracert/
Now the results are a little more difficult to describe here. You're looking for times (in general) of less than 100 -> 200 ms, and few (if any) 'timeouts' which are represented by an asterisk. If you've reached this step then you can simply mail the results of the trace to
support@hostmysite.com and a trained professional (read: me) will look at it and let you know if there appears to be any problems, and if so where the problem is. Most traces come back fine, but some point to peering issues between your ISP and one of it's upstream providers, or with one of our upstream providers.
b. Mailserver troubles
Even though I'm loathe to admit it, sometimes our mailservers do have issues that would result in the errors you're seeing as well. Sometimes they are easy to troubleshoot - if a server suddenly starts accepting a massive number of connections from an Asian Pacific IP address, for instance, it's a safe bet that we need to block that IP in order to prevent unwanted traffic from bogging down the server.
Also, our older format for mailservers, Imail, was notorious for running up the CPU in some instances. Increased CPU usage results in slow server performance, and SMTP operations are ALWAYS the most sensitive to these errors. In other words, if the server is bogging down SMTP will feel the effects long before POP or webmail.
Our Smartermail servers aren't completely immune to this either. One of the recent updates to Smartermail introduced SPF filtering, which is a very good feature however it was found to be a little server-intensive. I've been working with Smartermail for the last few weeks to get this resolved and they have come up with a patch that should do the trick. In fact, it's going to be applied tonight during the overnight so this whole essay on connection issues may prove to be pointless.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head (and you just thought the Email Admin title was fluff) but there may be more esoteric errors out there that could cause this problem. If you continue to have issues after tonight contact support and they'll be happy to assist you with troubleshooting the error.
