27 December, 2008

Happy Holidays

So to all Happy Holidays and to me a good Knight (sorry WOW) reference.

The Christmas season is here and nearly over. Any of you with out of state relatives know that the holiday is not over until the last straggler has left your happy home. 
Since my parents and nephews are still here we are still CELEBRATING!!!! 

I thought I needed to post this because, well, I haven't written in a while and a quick google search turned up nothing helpful, surprise surprise, on a windows mail error.

Dad brought his laptop, he is a comcast subscriber, not going there, we are optonline. 
Windows mail kept giving him this error message:
Socket error: 10061
And this error code: 0x800CCC08

Basically, dad is unable to send mail out from comcast from anywhere other than Panera Breads wi-fi or home. 
The reason for this is: 
1) Windows sucks? Windows firewall software is waaaaayyy too draconian?
2) Microsoft still hasn't figured out how to write error messages that are helpful?

No and yes. Really what it is is the way mail servers work and the domains you are connecting to them from.

I switched dad's outgoing smtp port to 587.
I turned on SSL on the incoming connection.
Vîola, he can SEND and receive all his email.

If you want a quick overview of why this works:
His mail client, Windows Mail, is now logging into the outgoing server everytime he sends mail. 
Using port 25, the default, he was only asking to use the server not actually telling it he was authorized. 

So, if Windows mail is giving you connection errors it may be because you need to switch outgoing SMTP ports from 25 to 587.