E-mails not being sent

@RuneJ

Public Internet connections are very often used by spammers for sending junk mail and will frequently be blocked temporarily so as to allow the spam activity to cool down. If you're account gets impacted by this we can open a ticket with our network support team to investigate further. We would just need your account info and the IP address of the connection you're using at the time. Note it can take up to 72 hours for a resolution depending on how many tickets they have at a given time.

Hi Chris, Sorry for not discovering your response earlier. I have a little more info to give. As I said in my original e-mail it didn't work from Japan and Portland on the way home from the Philippines.

Last week I tried sending an e-mail with my cellphone from Starbucks in Carlsbad. No success. A few days ago, I went to Black Angus here in Escondido and tried with my cellphone again. No success. I went home and sent an e-mail from the cellphone via the wi-fi in my house. I worked fine!

I logged in to web-mail and the mail I sent from Black Angus is sitting in the sent folder on the web (server) as is the one I sent from home. If the e-mail made it to the server, why didn't it go out?

As all these unsuccessful attempts were made from different places with different IP addresses (which I can't get now) it sounds like something else, right?

Is there any way you can analyze the e-mail stuck in the sent box in the server and determine why it wasn't sent out? What info do you need for that.

Best Regards,

Rune

@RuneJ

The items actually aren't making it to the server so there wouldn't be anything we could look at on our end. As for the issue at hand however this sounds exactly like what I was describing as how these all sound like public Internet access point from what you're saying.

ChrisL, I assume @RuneJ is using IMAP on his cell phone.  Since the email is visible in the sent folder on webmail, it is being copied to the sent folder by the cellphone client and synced with the server.  That is telling me the cellphone client is connected to the server and thinks the SMTP mail was sent successfully.  I would assume your SMTP server accepted the connection as anytime I have not been able to connect to it I receive an error message and my email stays in drafts, not moved to the sent.

This and the problem with receiving email from Twitter sound like Cox is once again dropping email without informing the customer.

Chris and Allen,

Correct, I'm using IMAP on my phone. Last night, I went to the Corvette Diner in San Diego and tried to send an e-mail from my phone using their wi-fi. Same result - the e-mail goes out from the cellphone but gets stuck in the sent folder on the server. It never goes out from there. I can see it in the sent folder on my web-mail and I can also see it in the sent folder on my tablet, which also uses IMAP. So, I think, it's pretty clear that the e-mail makes it to the Cox server but it never goes out from there.

The IP address a the Corvette diner was: 2607:fb90:220d:8c10:0:45:39cd:d701.

Could it be so that Cox, for some reason, only sends out the e-mails coming from my own IP address, which is 68.7.160.122 ?

Regards,

Rune

ChrisL,

Please, explain why you can't analyze the e-mail on the server when they are fully visible on the web-mail.

Also, I'm supposed to the posts on this forum sent to my e-mail. This doesn't happen. Why not?

Cheers,

Rune

@RuneJ when you send email from a client configured as IMAP, your message takes 2 different paths to the servers.

1. The actual email message is sent using SMTP to the server smtp.cox.net

2. The client puts a copy of the message in a folder for sent mail, this is configurable in most clients but defaults to SENT.  IMAP then syncs that folder with imap.cox.net server.  It is a copy but not the actual email sent via SMTP.  Since it didn't go thru the SMTP server, it really can't trace what happened.

Normally, if step 1 fails, the cellphone client has trouble contacting smtp.cox.net for some reason, you get an error message  and step 2 never happens.  Your outgoing mail stays in your Drafts folder or maybe copied to an Outbox folder.  That's what leads me to believe it's being accepted by the SMTP server but never getting out.

Your other comment, I haven't received email from any forum post in months even though I have "Email me replies" checked on all threads I reply to.

@AllenP,  I have to admit I'm not very good at the technical details of how e-mail works. The e-mails leave the cellphone and are stored in the sent folder on the e-mail. On the cellphone it looks like everything went fine. Doesn't this mean they must have reached SMTP at Cox?

When logging in to web-mail, the e-mails are found in the sent folder on the web-mail.

Also, on my other devices; tablet and desktop PC, the e-mails are showing up in the sent folders as they are synced with IMAP.

It seems like we can agree that the e-mails are accepted by SMTP but never goes out from there. Why? And, why do they get stuck only when I send them from an IP address other than the one at my house!?

I really can't believe this is something that only happens to me. There may be a lot of users having sent e-mails from 'the road' believing the e-mails made it to their final destination but they didn't. It's not that easy to discover the problem when everything looks fine in the sending end. 

So, any clues why SMTP fails sending out my e-mails?

Yes, the 'E-mail me replies to this post' - feature is clearly 'out of order'.

Cheers/RuneJ

@RuneJ

Can you try using webmail from these locations and see if you experience any problems sending that way?

Hi RuneJ, I saw this happen years ago, from my home Cox network.  Something in my email was triggering Cox's spam blocker and it was deleting it without sending or informing me.  I thought the email was sent but found out later it was never received.  Same symptoms but on my home network, not a public hotspot.  I finally got the answer ... "yes, we are deleting it, no, we are not notifying you, the sender, it's our network and we can do what we want!"  Not saying this is the problem but the symptoms are the similar.

I did a test this morning, turned off WiFi on my cell phone and sent an email to my gmail account using Verizon's data network.  No problem, it went through fine.  I will try another test when I go out for coffee tomorrow morning ... will use the coffeehouse's WiFi network as a test.  There is also a bar next door, will try to get on their network and test too.  Let you know what I find in the AM.

@ChrisL,

OK, I'll try to do that asap.

The e-mail that got stuck from Black Angus, I was able to send on by doing a forward (from home) on the mail sitting in the web-mail sent folder.

@ChrisL,  This is getting more confusing to me. I went to Starbucks to try what you asked for. I brought my cellphone and my laptop.

The IP address at this Starbuck was: 4.15.166.251. This is the result:

Test 1: E-mail from cellphone: Failed. The e-mail got stuck in the Outbox and I received an error message "Unable to negotiate MD5 CRAM".

Test 2: E-mail from Laptop: Send/Receive error. E-mail got stuck in the Outbox.

Test 3: Logging in to web-mail with laptop: Did not work. I could not log in to cox.com. It said  'An invalid UserID or PW was entered". The UserID and PW were definitely the correct ones!

Test 3: Logging in to web-mail with cellphone: Same result. It says the same about invalid UserID and PW although I know for sure they were correct.

I tried to log in so many times so I got locked out.

Now back home, the picture has changed in a strange way. The only way I now can use my Cox e-mail is to log in to web-mail. Outlook on my desktop and laptop and Bluemail on my tablet and cellphone have stopped working. It seems like IMAP and SMTP do not get the correct password. I'm sure I have the correct PW programmed. I get this screen telling me to put in the password and then I get an error message saying that: 'Your IMAP server closed the connection'.

What has happened?

Cheers,

Rune

@ChrisL,  A little more info: It seems like IMAP has gotten my ID or PW corrupted. On my tablet, where I use Bluemail, I removed my Cox e-mail. Then tried to add it again. It failed!I get a message saying that "The sync failed, your user name or password may be incorrect (3010). E-mail server returned: "-ERR invalid username or password"".

I have not changed any ID or PW!

The ID and PW are OK when logging in to web-mail. So, why doesn't IMAP accept it?

Cheers,

Rune

@RuneJ

I looked again and it now appears your account has been identified by our email team as being potentially compromised which I suspect is why you're having password troubles now. To fix that you'll need to reset your password making sure to use a new password which you've never used before.

@ChrisL,   Yes, something happened yesterday. In the evening I got a message from Lifelock that my Cox e-mail password had been found on social media. I changed the password and now e-mail is working OK again.

The password change seems to have fixed the original problem too. This morning, I was able to send e-mail with both my cellphone and tablet from a medical clinic in La Jolla. How can you explain this? Did I have 'partial' password problems before last night?

Anyway, it's working as far as I can see. I'll be traveling inside and outside the US in the next few weeks and will get a chance to put it to real test.

Thanks for your support.

Cheers,

Rune