Recently Thunderbird couldn’t send email anymore, giving this error:

Sending of message failed.

The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server mail.serafinistudios.com failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again, or else contact your network administrator.

A little investigation seemed to indicate that possibly it was the ISP blocking port 25. A call to SBC’s support center confirmed that indeed, they had recently started blocking port 25 in my region.

The very nice lady pointed me at the following URL to get my domain unblocked so that I could send out on port 25: http://help.sbcglobal.net/servabuse.php

Click on Opt Out Port 25 for the Abuse Type, and Email for the Abuse Occurred In: fields. Apparently they couldn’t be bothered to create a nice “I can’t s end out via SMTP any more. Please unblock me.” type page. Oh well. Supposedly in ~ 12 hours they’ll get it unblocked.

Until then, thank goodness for webmail, yo.

SBC Yahoo! Help – Report Abuse of Service

Update: We STILL can’t send out via port 25, so this morning I fixed Kristin’s Thunderbird settings to use Googles nice and fast smtp servers for sending out email. They rock. Use a nice high-level port, secure authentication, and, well, it just works. Anyone needing a Google invite, please let me know (have like 49 left now.)