Telnet your email server 12th May 2009 at 9:20 am
Very often it is necessary to test that your SMTP server is working.
The easiest way to do this is with the telnet command.
This lets you talk directly to the email server in its own SMTP protocol script language.
Here’s how…
telnet server name or IP address 25 HELO aaaa mail from: <tom@fromdomain.com> rcpt to: <fred@todomain.com> data Enter your message text . quit
Along the way you should see feedback from the server to each command entered
See below
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e.g.
Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1). Escape character is '^]'. 220 mailserver.local ESMTP Exim 4.43 Tue, 12 May 2009 10:31:00 +0100 helo aaaa 250 mailserver.local Hello mailserver.local [127.0.0.1] mail from: <tom@fromdomain.com> 250 OK rcpt to: <fred@todomain.com> 250 Accepted data 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself A message for myself. . 250 OK id=1M3oKj-0006Sn-9u quit 221 mailserver.local closing connection Connection closed by foreign host.

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