Cox Email

A customer experienced a problem with using a combination of email accounts in Outlook. Specifically, he used a Cox residential account with two other business email accounts. The host for the business email recommended using whatever SMTP server the Internet provider had at the office. This is a little problematical with laptops as many times the user will be at a hotel or home.

I sometimes get around the issue by allowing the customer to authenticate to our server using an alternate port number for sending email. I provided the ability whether or not the customer had an account on our email server. I've done it with other customer devices which needed SMTP services but never really liked using our server just for SMTP access.

This time around I decided to see if the customers current email provider would allow sending using an alternate port. I used the customer's Cox information, username without @cox.net, and the password in the SMTP authentication area for each business account. Using a search, I could not easily find an alternate port for Cox, so I just guessed using the standard 587. All the accounts tested fine at the office, but not at the customer's home.

I dug around using Google and found that Cox allows SMTP SSL on port 465. The port listing was buried in the instructions for configuring Outlook Express. After reconfiguring the authentication to use 465 for SMTP traffic, the mail seemed to flow for every account. The customer is testing next week to make sure the fix works at other locations.