Hello all. I thought I would put a post on here to prevent anyone else having the frustration and time wasted that I have for the past few months with regard to my self hosted internal SMTP server.
I have a static IP address and I have an SMTP server running on a machine at home. The necessary DNS settings are all in place at my domain host to toward email to the static IP address. Port 25 is forwarded on my router. This worked fine until a few months back when my incoming mail stopped arriving.
I contacted Plusnet and asked them what had changed their end, nothing was the answer. I then suspected my SMTP server switched back to using pop3 (which worked) and spent several hours trying to work out what had changed at my end. Nothing.
Contacted plus net again and got a new router as my old one was very old and not one supplied by Plusnet. Replaced the new router set up port forwarding still no success. Contacted Plusnet again and asked if they could be blocking port 25. Answer, "no, we don't block anything, it is not our place to filter internet traffic coming to your static address". Lived with the situation for a month or so but not ideal using pop3 for reasons I won't go into here.
Last week tried again, switched on logging on the router to see if my test emails were getting to the router. Nothing. Contacted Plusnet again, they wanted to start playing with my MS Outlook settings! I asked to speak to someone who understood DNS, port forwarding etc, Finally got to speak to the techie who was "floor walking" at the time and explained the situation.
"Let me see what ports our firewall blocks on it's low setting. Ah it is blocking port 25"! Eureka!
Why don't all the tech support staff know about their own firewall and what it blocks. I asked him to switch off the firewall at their end. Hey presto my mail starts arriving as it should!
So several months ago something did change at the Plusnet end. Either the firewall was switched on (possibly when I changed package to unlimited) or someone changed the settings for their "low" firewall setting. Time has been wasted by both Plusnet and myself simply because the handful of techies I spoke to didn't know that they DO block incoming ports on their firewall by default.
Moral to this story. If you suddenly stop receiving stuff you used to via your static IP address insist that Plusnet support look at the firewall settings at their end and make sure that it is not the culprit.
Phil
