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

  • Magical Mystery Tour

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Pictures from the latest vacation adventure are up. There are a bunch more than these, perhaps someday some of the areas on this tour will simply be moved into their own little galleries, but for now this will give you a good overveiw of where I was and what I saw! Follow these topics: Uncategorized

  • Remote Calendars

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I’ve written before about my reluctance to use Google Calendar because my whole schedule is in Outlook and I have used Yahoo’s for keeping my wife informed on my calendar because Google doesn’t have an easy way to synchronize with Outlook. I thought today when I saw a link to this post about Remote Calendars…

  • Happy Sys- Admin day

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I’m obviously not in the office so no one is going to “appreciate” me, you know like they even notice me outside of when something needs fixed. *L* Listening to Nelson Minar talk about the magic behing Google. It’s pretty interesting. I’m sure the more developer-type folks here have more to say about it. Follow…

  • Not all it’s cracked up to be.

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    You know, staying home and resting seemed like a good idea, until I noticed that the currently-vacant house next door is having some rather loud repairs done to it, and every recorded-message telemarketing firm in existence has decided to call our house this afternoon! Grr! Hopefully Jason remembers to bring the extra wireless access point…

  • Office 2007 Beta

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Yup, downloaded it last night. Took until this evening to get it activated. Highly recommend you disable the AVG Outlook plugin that scans incoming email BEFORE you fire up Outlook 2007 to download your email. The email will come in with no content if you let AVG scan it, there is no way to get…

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.)