Question : Third party program Email works internally but not externally

Hi guys,

I am running sbs 2003 sp1

I have some third party accounting software that emails as one of its features.

one of its functions is to email everyones pay information, while this was happening I found that it was failing on all external email addresses, sending to anything within the domain worked fine.

Our exchange e-mail is working correctly and sending externally with no problems which has left me kind of confused around the whole thing, if exchange is working then I am not sure where to start troubleshooting.

The error I receive from the software is "failed to connect to smtp server" but the programs error's are very very generic, so this may not necesarily outline the problem.

If anyone has any ideas around this then it would be really helpful.

Cheers

Answer : Third party program Email works internally but not externally

The problem is most likely that you need to authenticate to send to an external email address.   Your mail server, most likely, does not require authentication for email addresses with the same domain, which is a common setting.

If there is any type of logging capability, I'm pretty certain you would see an SMTP error 550-554.

Check the program documentation or with the program manufacturer for a way to set authentication parameters.

I see this type of thing all of the time and I am almost 100% certain that this is the cause.