Issues Sending Mail

Customers have recently reported problems sending mail. This problem appears to be caused by restrictions put in place by many Internet Service Providers.

Some customers have contacted us recently, reporting that their ability to send email via Australian Internet Solutions has stopped working all of a sudden, however incoming/receiving mail still works fine.

The cause of this problem relates to restrictions put in place by many Internet Service Providers (such as Bigpond, Optus, iPrimus, iiNet, and others), who are trying to prevent spam from being launched from within their own network, by restricting E-mail to their own local network

These restrictions have been in force by many ISPs for several months now, however because the ISP's networks are quite large, they perform these upgrades in stages, meaning that your neighbour who uses the same ISP might have been affected months ago, but you might have only recently been affected if another stage of the restrictions was implemented.

Indications from our customers suggest the most recent implementation at BIGPOND began around August 15th.

This problem can be resolved by changing your Outgoing Email Server to your ISP's mail server.

Known ISP's affected, and their associated outgoing/SMTP mail servers are as follows:

Telstra Bigpond : mail.bigpond.com

iPrimus / Primus Telecom : smtp.iprimus.com.au

Optus / OptusNet : mail.optusnet.com.au

iiNet : mail.m.iinet.net.au **

If your ISP is not listed, please refer to their support site, or call them to find out the outgoing server.

Note: Only your outgoing mail server setting needs to be changed, and you must disable SMTP Authentication. Incoming mail is NOT affected, and the incoming server setting should remain the same as it was configured previously.

This change does not affect your From Email Address, nor should it impact on email delivery time, or performance. This change will be completely transparent to you customers, colleagues and friends.

If you have problems changing your outgoing email-server settings, or you aren't sure what your outgoing ISP's email server settings are, please contact your Internet Service Provider.

There is another workaround and that is to set your outgoing smtp port to 26 and enable full authentication including authenticating with your full e-mail address in the username field and your password in the password field (see our e-mail tutorials for how to set up using port 26  method)