Hello. I’m using SuSE v. 11.1, KMail v. 1.9.10, and KDE v. 3.5.10 (release 21.13.1).
Up until a few weeks ago KMail worked perfectly. I have two identities, one which I use for personal mail and one I use for business mail ( @bellsouth.net ).
For reasons I cannot figure out e-mail sent using the bellsouth.net identity is only delivered to a very few recipients. Even though KMail is sending (no error messages upon transmission), almost all addressees report receiving nothing.
There are no issues with inbound e-mail.
Note: I am able to send to any address (e.g., @gmail.com or @excite.com) using the bellsouth.net website at this URL:
But if I try to send to the same addresses from KMail the messages are not delivered.
I spoke to bellsouth.net tech support. Though they won’t provide any help to Linux users they did say that if I can send to an address from their website but not from my e-mail client then the problem must be within my e-mail client.
Yet no settings have changed in KMail (at least nothing I can see). Besides, if there were a problem with the outbound KMail settings then none of my messages should be getting through, yet some do. It’s selective non-delivery.
I am completely baffled by this, and not being able to use my business identity is a HUGE problem. So I really need to find the solution and get my bellsouth.net outbound e-mails to the intended recipients.
If there is additional information I can post, please let me know.
Some ISPs will not forward mail from an untrusted source; it is possible that the problem is not Kmail but that, for some reason, your second email address has not been validated as a trusted source.
But the second e-mail address has worked in KMail on this ISP since around 2005. It’s just suddenly that messages sent to many/most addresses are not being delivered. So I would assume that the @bellsouth.net address has been trusted all along – or at least until this recent problem.
*"There really is no mystery that emails you are trying to send using a sender address of @bellsouth.net are getting refused and (my other identity/address) is not getting refused. Your email client is not doing SMTP authentication so the mail transport can’t tell who is sending the email. It’s accepted by the server in the first place only because you have done pop3 authentication.
"In other words, it can be determined that you have been authenticated somehow, but without the clue of the from address exactly who you are isn’t known. The mail transport does the best it can in this situation. It sets the sender to the from address.
"(My other identity/address) is an identity capable of authenticating on the server, so it works. The identity @bellsouth.net is not, so it doesn’t.
“One solution to your problem is to do SMTP authentication. The other is to send email from @bellsouth.net from a bellsouth.net email server.”*
Now what really throws me in that answer is the statement that I should be doing SMTP authentication rather than POP. But that is how KMail is configured, of course. It is set to SMTP for sending, not to POP. But my ISP insists (confirmed on the phone) that the @bellsouth.net identity is authenticating the outbound mail by POP rather than SMTP.
The tech support guy told me that my personal identity is authenticating by SMTP but that the @bellsouth.net identity is authenticating by POP.
Since some emails actually work but others don’t this seems to be a ball-up at Bell-South. It seems that you are authenticating or else none would get through. So Bell-South explanation does not make any sense. Is it always the same addresses or is it random?
It is pretty clear that something has changed either on the server you use to send, or for the bellsouth domain. I checked for SPF records for bellsouth, but don’t find them. So the chances are that something has changed on the server that you are using. This does not seem to be a change in kmail.
Beyond that, it is hard to say; there is too little information.
You should be able to setup kmail to use the “smtp.att.yahoo.com” server for sending “bellsouth.net” email. I’m not a kmail user, though, so I’m not sure of the details on doing that.
If you configure your Kmail SMTP account to send via SSL you will find that it changes to port 995 and asks you for the password every time you send. In practice I use KWallet so, after opening KWallet to collect my mails, everything is automatic.
There is also a button to click which allows you to find out what authentication method the SMTP server supports.
I started with “Identities” by ticking the box under the Advanced tab that says “special transport” and using the drop-down box to select bellsouth. But that alone did not fix the problem. Doing that resulted in an error message that my e-mails were stuck in the outbox and would remain there until I fixed the problem.
But what was the problem?
I called bellsouth and talked to a tech support guy who tried to be helpful but who knew nothing about KMail. Bellsouth gave me a different host server to try (mail.bellsouth.net) instead of the att.yahoo server I had been using (and also a new port).
But still the problem persisted.
The bellsouth tech guy was totally befuddled by the problem. But he kept commenting about “SSL.” So I read him the various options listed for encryption and authentication in KMail, but he did not know which I should use. Most of them he did not even recognize.
And surprisingly, even clicking on the button that says “check what the server supports” didn’t get me settings that worked. The e-mail still was trapped in the outbox and not getting sent.
So after that conversation I set the host and port back as they had been (smtp.att.yahoo.com and port 465) and started trying various combinations under the security tab until suddenly an e-mail went to my @gmail.com account. I tried sending to my @excite.com address and that also worked.
In the end the solution was in the “security” tab under the bellsouth.net “sending” configuration screen – the “encryption” and “authentication” radio buttons.
For my regular e-mail identity that goes through my website hosting service the security must be set to “TLS” and “plain.” But that doesn’t work with bellsouth where I have to use “SSL” and “plain.” And, again, clicking that box that says “check what the server supports” wasn’t getting the right settings.
It was all just trial and error.
So thanks to everyone for your insight and assistance on this odd problem. As I had not previously changed the settings in KMail I can only assume that something changed at bellsouth when it migrated the mail servers to yahoo.com.
(Lots of details follow)