After half a day trying to get James to forward outgoing mail to the
Internet I was at my wits end. Everything seemed to be configured correctly,
James was accepting the message but it disappeared into a black hole.
Incoming mail worked fine. My existing mail account with the ISP worked
fine. It is always tempting to blame the new software in this situation, but
it wasn't the case.
My ISP, Telstra Bigpond, blocks port 25 for all but its own smtp server.
Apparently this is an anti-spam measure that you only find out about when
you try to run your own mail server. Most customers never encounter
limitation. Old discussion forums indicate that blocking port 25 for all but
the ISPs own service is quite common in the industry.
I've posted this article in the hope it may help save others the same
anxiety I felt when James failed to send outgoing e-mail.
The solution was to configure James to use the ISP's nntp server as a
gateway. The James config file has a template that makes it easy:
<!-- A single mail server to deliver all outgoing messages. -->
<!-- This is useful if this server is a backup or failover
machine, -->
<!-- or if you want all messages to be routed through a
particular mail server, -->
<!-- regardless of the email addresses specified in the message
-->
<!-- -->
<!-- The gateway element specifies the gateway SMTP server name.
-->
<!-- If your gateway mail server is listening on a port other
than 25, -->
<!-- you can set James to connect to it on that port using the
gatewayPort -->
<!-- element. -->
<!-- Although normally multiple addresses are implemented
through proper -->
<!-- DNS configuration, the RemoteDelivery mail does allow
specifying -->
<!-- multiple gateway elements, each of which may also have a
port -->
<!-- e.g., mygateway:2525 -->
<!-- the gatewayPort element is used as a default -->
<gateway>mail.bigpond.com</gateway>
<gatewayPort>25</gatewayPort>
<!-- If the gateway requires smtp authentication the following
directives -->
<!-- (gatewayusername/gatewayPassword) can be used. -->
<gatewayusername>your_username</gatewayusername>
<gatewayPassword>your_password</gatewayPassword>
David Moss
