Email Problems in Hotels

[rafamous]

I have several hotels set up for internet and every now and then I get a client in the hotel who can't send email using outlook express.

:confused:

They usually say "well when I stayed at such and such hotel they just gave me some new servers to put in my outlook configurations".

Anyone ever experience this? I have emails for my customers but how do I get thier email to work with my servers?

Thanks for any help.

[go.fast]

Wild guess here, but I bet it only happens to a very few.
Most likely those who it does happen to are those that have not taken their laptop away from home before and tried to send email through their isp's email server, but not on their isp's network.

Most lilkely they need to have authentication enabled on their outgoing mail server settings in their OE.

It's probably out of your hands.

[butchkemper]

Here are issues to consider:

Some older versions of Outlook Express will not properly authenticate with the mail server.
Some networks block access to port 25 outside the network. The user may have changed to another port and your mail server may not support the port that is configured in OE.


Butch

[rafamous]

Thanks for the responses.

Yes, it is very rare that this happens.

Have checked all that has been mentioned and still no go.

Though I did not check the port they where using.

I don't get what the "other" company is doing by giving them a new server to input into their outlook to get it to work.

This particular client just rudely says, "well, then I'll just go back to the Holiday Inn where they could get it to work".

Oh well, all I can do is all I can do.

[lonnie]

This is a simple anti spam mechanism called open relay. Their home mail server will only accept smtp outgoing from IP addresses it recognizes. Thus you have to give them your email server for their temporary smtp so that they can send from your server which allows them.

As others have said this can also be handled by having them authenticate with their server. We have ours set to require that they check their mail first, which authenticates them, and then they can send from an unknown IP. Otherwise we refuse the email.

[tog]

To get around 98% of such problems you can/should setup SMTP/SSL w/ SMTP auth. It runs on port 465 (so places that block port 25 will not affect you) and SMTP auth is so people have to put in their login/pass in order to send outgoing mail so they can do so from anywhere.

I have seen bellsouth.net blocks outgoing port 465, but that's it so far.

You could also provide webmail (preferably on an https server)

[go.fast]

The issue doesn't really sound like it has anything to do with rafamous.
It's an issue between the hotel guest and his email provider.


We provide nationwide dial up for our subs to take with them on their trips away from home and we set up our subs properly in the begining, whereas before we provided roaming dial up, we never bothered with the outoing authentication.

[rafamous]

We do require authentication for out going mail. The thing is these clients are not on my email system. I have done a work around in the past by just setting them up a temp email with us.

I asked if they has webmail access to their email, they said yes, but they didn't want that, they wanted outlook.

I did give them the servers that I use but it still did not let them send mail. I have that one going to a spam/virus scanner. Do you think the scanner blocked them?

I have a few more that are not scanned do you think they would work in a situation like this. Just sure would like to be able to give it the knock out punch line "the guys at the Holiday in". These hotels pay pretty good and sure would like to make the guests happy.:)

Thanks for all the input.

[tog]

This isn't some kind of Guest-tek or whatever system where the filtering for guest connectivity and whatnot is controlled tightly by a third-party company that neither you nor the Hotel might have intimate knowledge of?

Blocking outbound port 25 isn't a bad idea, however inconvenient it may be for guests. When I go use public Internet connections I do not expect port 25 to work.

Anyway, if outbound port 25 isn't actually being filtered and the guests are simply getting error messages from their ISPs about relaying being denied... well that's not really something you can fix unless you silently redirect outbound port 25 through an SMTP server of your own.

Sorry, but I don't have a very clear picture or many specifics so I can't provide very specific help.

[rafamous]

I appreciate your efforts to help.

If the hotel owner has a problem with 1 client out of 3000 who can't send on a third party software then that's just the way it is.

Sometimes I wonder if it's not someone phishing for some mail server to spam on...

[rafamous]

Got it - redirect port 25 to my server. Sweet. Thanks.

Can this be done for just that IP or do I need to do it for the whole box?

[oscarBravo]

Redirecting port 25 is really only a good idea if your server is watching for dodgy SMTP activity and blocking as necessary. You do not want your server IP blacklisted for spamming.

[rafamous]

That's for sure.

So I should be able to do that for the single IP not the whole subnet in StarOS.

[go.fast]

Redirecting port 25 is really only a good idea if your server is watching for dodgy SMTP activity and blocking as necessary. You do not want your server IP blacklisted for spamming.
I was wondering why it would be a good idea to alow an unknown person to use my outgoing mail server.

Seems like an opportunity for a spammer to take advantage of.

[palmczak]

Being I live in tourist town we have had to relay mail for lots of hotels/hotspots.

I have a separate email server that handles all relay for these. We use a Linux VPS hosting service to run Qmail with some pretty strict rules. There is no POP/ IMAP server. All traffic is redirected to this server and it is logged if there is a problem we know where it came from and when. The server will tarpit you if you try to send more than 25 emails at a time. Being this is off site the only thing that can get black listed is the relay server our in house mail server is not involved at all.

This server handles a fair bit of mail and this far has never been blacklisted. It has worked very well for us.

[rafamous]

I knew that this was a little more common. Sorry, only been doing this for about three years. Does anyone know a good tutorial on how to redirect smtp traffic to a seperate box like this? Thanks for all the help.

The good thing is the hotel owner said don't worry about it, it's no big deal.