CANNOT TELNET LOCALHOST -SHOULD BE EASY ?

[BFClem]

W98 stand alone, NIC installed and DUN. Dailer works to local ISP POP, can send and receive email using webmail.

Last week, a long-time mail client program on same system was working fine, sending and receiving mail once dialed into ISP. Now, can only receive mail, not send.

We think because we initialed a dialer through the mail program instead of the DUN icon, something happened and now the following issues occur:

Can receive mail
Cannot send mail (winsock error 10038)
Cannot telnet localhost on 110 or 25
Read all Technet stuff, nothing popped out.
Uninstalled mail client, no change
Installed Opera 7 to try mail client. Same thing, inbound fine, no outbound.
Have gone to network neighborhood and killed all, reinstalling NIC and whatevers.
Mail service is through Comcast, whose mail server is mail.comcast.net and outbound is smtp.comcast.net, or at least it was.

I've run out of ideas. This should be a simple one but somehow we cannot work around it.

Thanks.

 

[jrbarnett]

Can you ping the mail servers?
Also, you say you can't telnet to localhost on ports 110 and 25. This suggests to me that you used to be able to - is this the case? If so, the most likely host of such a port on a Win9x box is a mail server or network proxy application (eg Wingate, Netproxy, VPop3, ICS etc) which uses port forwarding to send it to the 'real' mail server.

If receiving mail works, then it sounds like the ISP's SMTP server has IP address authentication in order to prevent using it as a mail relay. You also say that you initiated a dialler through the mail program rather than the DUN icon - so I would check that you are dialling ComCast rather than another ISP, and that the SMTP name is set correctly in your email client.

John

 

[BFClem]

JR-
Thanks, you are exactly right. The dial-up ISP has SMTP authentication that I was not aware of, so in order to get the Comcast mail throught a different dial-up service, I had to evoke the smtp authentication screens and then it worked.

Thanks
BFClem