Troubleshooting email, the Telnet way

How to send email when port 25 is blocked

Jeff Widmer's Blog — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:28:11 GMT

I run Windows Server 2008 as my development environment and use the local SMTP service to send emails

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re: Troubleshooting email, the Telnet way

Alex Tough — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 21:45:42 GMT

Thanks for the useful artcle. Is it possible to authenticate with the mailserver via telnet using your username and password.

What would the syntax look like?

re: Troubleshooting email, the Telnet way

Scott Forsyth — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 17:06:00 GMT

You got it. There are other factors in play. Even my comment about leaving out the subject causes test messages to fail the spam tests sometimes, and the SMTP authentication is a key factor in testing. BTW, usually a server will allow you to send to email accounts on the same server without SMTP authentication so sending to yourself on the mail server you are on usually doesn't have issues with SMTP authentication. 'Helo me' isn't detailed enough to get by the spam filters without a warning flag. So, there are a few factors in play if trying to get a perfect email by a spam filter. Hopefully this serves as a way to do a quick and dirty test in most cases. I use it nearly daily myself. If a spam filter gets in the way then someone will need to tweak their steps more to get through.

re: Troubleshooting email, the Telnet way

Eric Newton — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:39:00 GMT

yip, a quick and dirty way to test email servers and send a quick msg.

although most email servers are now "spam aware" so they are requiring Authentication + no relaying, which can cause test problems. In addition, if you use your "localhost" email, if the domain that the email "appears to be from" doesnt match DNS records, then the receiving email server will reject it as well...

SPAM has ruined Email as we know it.