What Happened

Starting sometime around August 23, 2004, Optimum Online, the internet service provider owned and operated by Cablevision which serves the tri-state area, started blocking port 25 on all residential accounts as part of their battle against spam. We imagine you don't quite know what this means if you send email. Here is Cablevision's explanation as to the matter:

click here to read

Because this change was made with little or no notification to the end user, many people were (and still are) left stranded with email clients that fail to connect to their destination server, with "connection time-out" and "connection refused" being two of the more common symptoms.

Simple Solution

If you know where your email client stores its outgoing mail settings, especially SMTP server, it is easy.

1. In place of your usual outgoing mail (SMTP) server, eg., mail.myshopdomain.com,
   type in (without quotes) "optonline.net".

2. Turn off "Authentication Required" or something like that.

3. Apply these settings.

4. Send mail as usual.

03/01/2005

Problems with sending email from home with Optonline again?

OptimumOnLine changed its mail server name to mail.optonline.net again without any notice to clients.

Solution

Be sure that the SMTP sever is mail.optonline.net instead of plain optonline.net.

If you have any problems, call us at 631-549-0064.