Outlook Express Problems

If you are using our Web Mail interface to access your email you may ignore this message.

A great many customers are using Outlook Express to send and receive email with no difficulty and, if you start OE after connecting to the Oceanfree service, in general you will not experience any problems.

However, we have received some enquiries from customers regarding an error they experience when trying to send email using our POP3/SMTP service (Outlook Express).

Background:
SMTP is the protocol used by Outlook Express and other Internet clients to send mail to a server for onward delivery. Typically SMTP is an unauthenticated protocol i.e. it requires no login (username and password or similar). Therefore it would be possible for someone to connect to an SMTP server and spoof (pretend to be someone else when sending a message) and / or send spam (sending unsolicited mail to large numbers of users).

POP3, which is a protocol used by many clients like OE to retrieve (download) new mail from a server, is an authenticated protocol i.e. it requires a username and password in order to log in. The oceanfree service has, as part of our anti-spam capability, a security feature that makes use of this authentication. In line with many other email services, we require customers to check for new mail first (using POP3) so that attempts to spoof or send spam mail can be managed.

Example 1 - the reported error is of the following form:

"The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'username@oceanfree.net'. Subject 'subject', Account: 'oceanfree account', Server: 'smtp.oceanfree.net', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '553. To send mail, first check your mail with a valid POP account; this prevents unauthorized SPAM relaying. (#5.7.1)', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 553, Error Number: 0x800CCC79"

Solution: If you start Outlook Express after connecting to the Oceanfree service in general you will not experience this error message. This is because OE at start-up automatically logs on to the server to download email prior to sending any email thereby establishing the authorisation of the sender. Similarly, if you send your email by doing a full Send/Receive in OE you should not experience any difficulty. If you wish to be able to send messages without doing a full Send/Receive or if you wish to have Outlook Express active on your PC prior to connecting to the Oceanfree service we recommend the following modification to your Outlook Express configuration.

Start Outlook Express and go to Tools menu option and select Accounts. Click on your oceanfree account and choose Properties. Select the Servers tab. At the bottom of this tab in an area titled "Outgoing Mail Server" untick the check box titled "My server requires authentication". Save the new setting and this will ensure that the next time you use OE it will authorise itself to the mail server in all circumstances thereby avoiding this error message.

Example 2 - the reported error is of the following form:

"The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'test@hotmail.com' . Subject 'The monthly collection', Account: 'Test (Oceanfree.net)', Server: 'smtp.oceanfree.net', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '550 relaying to prohibited by administrator', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 550, Error Number: 0x800CCC79

Solution:You are required to enter the SMTP server of the ISP you are connected to at the time of sending or connect to Oceanfree.net to send through our SMTP server to resolve this issue.

Thank you for using the Oceanfree service and we hope this Technical Bulletin will prove useful to those of you experiencing this error message.