You see something new every day..

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

That’s the thing about working in IT, every once in awhile, you get to see something go wrong, and say “I have no idea why that just happened”. Today it was an SMTP change implemented by the place that acts as our ISP. I keep a completely seperate account in Outlook on my work desktop, from this domain in fact, so that I can interact through email with other IT folks during the course of the work day, without having to use web-mail or give out my work email address. Well, I always figured that someday the ISP might start blocking port 25 and I’d have to do something different, but I always figured I would find out when I sent an email using that account and it simply got blocked. Wrong!

Turns out that rather than blocking the port 25 traffic, they redirected it, I guess. So when I sent an email from that account, it got re-routed to my work SMTP settings, and the return address got changed to my work address! I’ve never seen that behavior before, and I wasn’t exactly happy about it either, since I don’t want my work email address getting out to the public!

Turns out, after a few emails back and forth with the ISP, who didn’t really have any explanation, that if I change the SMTP to send this account’s email through our ISP’s server, it doesn’t change the return address, which is better. Not perfect, but I checked the headers and can see where it has the ISP’s mail server name and not our company name anywhere so I can live with it, or I can just use Gmail from now on and keep it all on the web. 😉

Strange update: My laptop, which has all of my personal accounts setup in Outlook, but not my work account, doesn’t display this behavior at all. If I plug it into my work network, I can send using any SMTP server, and the address stays consistent. So it’s not the ISP, it’s something on this desktop! Ugh!

Second Update: This discussion thread seemed to have a good grip on what was happening, and changing it to authenticate to the SMTP server allowed me to send using my own SMTP server again. The strange thing that bugs me is why this changed all of the sudden, and why, once I authenticated the one time, I could turn it off and everything was back to the way it was yesterday!

Tags: SMTP Outlook
Share with your friends!
LinkedInBlueskyMastodonThreadsRedditBuffer

Similar Posts

  • Must read later

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Note to self: Later, read through all the responses to this slashdot thread about what you would include in an IT toolkit. Looks like there are some pretty good tools and ideas running around in there, but I need to do some work and can’t really look at them all right now. (link via nf0)…

  • |

    Ethical Considerations of Outsourcing

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I caught this post over at Above and Beyond KM today while I was taking a look at twitter updates from LegalTech New York. It’s about the ethical and practical considerations of outsourcing legal work. Mary doesn’t mention ediscovery specifically, but she did share with me that ediscovery was absolutely mentioned during the session. Specifically…

  • Change of plans

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I wound up getting disinvited to the Board meeting today. Turns out they invited 12 staff people on top of the 50 or so Board members who were going to be there, and only had a conference room that holds 55 people. Since I only found out yesterday, and had nothing else planned for today,…

  • Morning News Items

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Could Hollywood hack your PC? – this law, yet again, gives the RIAA and MPAA the ability to use whatever means necessary to block file trading, regardless of whatever potential damage is done to consumers, and makes it next to impossible for consumers to be compensated if they go too far and cause actual damage….

  • |

    Linked: A New Skill a Day Keeps the Stress Away

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I found this opening paragraph pretty interesting in and of itself. With the current uncertainty in our daily lives, many people are more stressed than ever. Conventional wisdom says to eat well, exercise, and relax to reduce stress. While that’s all great advice, studies show that learning may relieve stress better than relaxing.  In recent…

  • Baby

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Angela’s got a couple of pictures of our baby neice. We made it over to see her last night. More later, I’ve got to run to Microcenter for that longer Ethernet cord… Follow these topics: Uncategorized

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)