Hello all,
I have successfull installed moodle in a winxp environment, however the message "Could not connect to SMTP host." is shown when a confirmation email must be sent to a new user. I have spend many hours in the forum reading topics with the same problem, however it still does not work. I have logged in as admin and in the panel "Site Administration" I changed the email settings (under server >> email).
Before done this, I have created an email account under yahoo. So, my settings are:
SMTP hosts: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
SMTP username: geoathanasis
SMTP username: xxxxxx
And then, I saved the settings. I have not done any other changes However, I still get an "Could not connect to SMTP host." error. Does anyone please know what am I doing wrong?
Thank you in advance!
I don't think you can use FREE email accounts, like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail as a host for sending emails. They don't give you access to your account via POP3, and they do not allow you to send or receive your emails outside of their own environment. You usually need a "real" server.
BUT there is a possible work around...
I use Mozilla Thunderbird, and this is great for checking/sending my emails from our own server. But I still had a couple of Yahoo accounts that I had to manually login to Yahoo in order to check (pain in the butt). I found a little free program called Yahoopops that bridges the gap though, and allows me to download my Yahoo emails into Thunderbird without having to login to the Yahoo site.
I think it also allows you send your emails back out again, but I would be reluctant to be sending bulk or forum type emails this way, because it may violate the "terms of use" with Yahoo.
This isn't always the case. Yahoo does allow pop and smtp access, although you need to configure it in options on your yahoo mail inbox.
try using just "mail.yahoo.com " as the smtp server, the uk server is "mail.yahoo.co.uk"
also the username has to be the full e-mail address eg: fubar@yahoo.com
I would like to thank all people that tried to help me with the "Could not connect to SMTP host" problem. finally, I found the reason of the problem: It was the Mcafee on-access virus scan that blocked port 25 to prevent mass mailing worms from sending email. After disabling this option, I could successfully authenticate new users!
I solved the SMTP problem on my installation by changing the port that the mailer uses. You will find probably that your ISP blocks port 25, so I had to change mine to 587, like this
In the field where you type your smtp server, add :587 to the end.
ie. [smtp.yourmailserver.com:587]
You can test for blocked ports by doing a telnet to your server.
telnet smtp.yourmailserver.com 25 (note - not :25, just a space in this case)
it will either error/time out if blocked, or return you a login message.
If it errors out, try 2525, next try 587 - that one works for me.
I may also work for gmail. It's your ISP blocking port 25.