Email Error - "Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied"
 

I have Mandrake Linux running on a Intel based PC. I use MS Outlook to send/receive email from a laptop. Email has been working fine since June when it was setup, but now I'm receiving the following error in an email which arrives in the Inbox with subject: "Undeliverable: Testing again - 10.31"

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: Testing again - 10.31
Sent: 10/31/02 12:42 PM

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

'somebody@somedomain' on 10/31/02 12:42 PM
554 <somebody@somedomain>: Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied

where "Testing again - 10.31" is the subject of the email I sent and "somebody@somedomain" is actually the email address of the recipient to which I sent the email address - just didn't want to put the real email address in here.

Given:

1. The recipient email address is good - It's one of my own and is having no problems. I've tried to send email to 3 different email addresses which are my own on different systems - work, hotmail and earthlink.

2. I can send and receive email when I'm at home with this very same account. At Home, my connection from Charter Communications comes in to the house via coax and into the cable modem (static IP), the cable modem feeds a Linksys cable modem router/4-port hub, the Linksys connects from one port to the Linux server and from another port to my laptop (Win2000 with MS Outlook)

3. I can receive, but not send email when at work.

4. Nothing has changed with my hardware or software configuration at home.

5. In MS Outlook under Tools | Email Accounts the accounts shows up as IMAP/SMTP both at home and at work.


When the problem occurs:

The problem occurs when trying to use email on the linux server from MS Outlook at work. It began a week ago when I installed MS Outlook on my computer at work and configured it exactly (I've checked this several times - even brought in screen prints from my home computer) as I did my home computer. So, send/receive works when I'm at home, but I can only receive when I'm at work. Whenever I send a message from my work computer, the email goes from Outbox to Sent Items and then I receive and email in the Inbox as noted above with the "Undeliverable" subject. The email never arrives at the email account to which it was sent. Now, at work, we use Lotus Notes so there are no other email accounts configured in MS Outlook which could interfere with the one I've setup. Any thoughts what might be causing this problem?

Also, I tested external access when I first setup the linux server by dialing in to my service provider so that my connection from my laptop was "outside" of my router and everything worked just fine.

Thanks,
Brandon

Check with your IT Department at your work, they may require you to send using their outgoing mail servers, causing the relay error your getting while at work.