Well you might think that Earthlink is only worth as much as spam. But
Earthlink is now listed on spam blacklists. If you use smtp.earthlink.net to send mail for your home or office, you might be surprised to see that some of the mail is now coming back as "not delivered" because the sending server is "know for sending spam".
After about an hour phone call to Earthlink technical support, I was able to somehow decypher what the foreign tech support staff was trying to say. Instead of using smtp.earthlink.net, we are now to use smthauth.earthlink.net as our outbound mail server. And to top that off we need to authenticate with our earthlink email account and password and use connect to them only on port 587.
New outbound mail server: smtpauth.earthlink.net
New outbound mail server port: 587
Authenticate with your earthlink username and password.
Talk about a mess for a small office. And a mess for anyone not using earthlink.net as their email address anyway. My clients office just uses them for the DSL line. Earthlink makes us use their mail servers because they are afraid we will send spam. What a crock!
For my client, that meant digging through ancient documentation to find out firstly what their earthlink.net email address even is. Since no one used it before, no really knew. I found an ancient piece of handwritten notes stuffed in a drawer near the server that finally did the trick.
I also had to
change the ports that their internal Exchange server was using to send mail. Instead of the default port 25, I had to change it deep in the Exchange server settings to the new port, 587. Not only the port, but I had to change
Exchange 2003 to authenticate to send mail with the new settings. I actually
added this is two locations in Exchange before my test emails worked.
Try these links if you need to change your settings in
Outlook or
Outlook Express.
