There are three main possible reasons for this, each discussed in detail below:
To help stop the sending of spam, many ISPs are now blocking port 25, the standard email sending port. If this is occuring to you, you'll receive an error when you try to send from your email software. The error is usually something like "server connection failed" or a similar message.
The easiest way to work around this is to change your email software to use port 587 instead, or to switch to SSL mode, and use port 465. See the remote server names and ports page or the remote email setup instructions page for more information.
Most email clients make it relatively easy to change the SMTP port. For Eudora, it's a little tricky. See this link for more information.
Our server requires that you use authenticated SMTP to send email. If you haven't enabled this, you'll get an error when you try to send from your email software. The error is usually something like "You must be authenticated to use this service" or a similar message.
The vast majority of email software supports authenticated SMTP, but you may have to check a box in one of the account setup pages of your email software to enable it.
See the remote email setup instructions page for detailed instructions on setting up different email software.
A quick summary to fix Outlook Express: Go to the Tools menu and select Accounts . Then select your 'fastmail.fm' account from the list and click Properties . Move to the tab named Servers and make sure the My server requires authentication checkbox is checked.
To get Outlook to save sent messages in your Sent Items folder, see this Microsoft Knowledge Base article .
There may simply be some internet congestion between you and FastMail.FM, or your ISP may be having temporary routing or proxy server problems.
FastMail.FM uses www.pingdom.com to monitor our core services. You can view those reports publicly at http://www.pingdom.com/reports/lzdx4pr0pdhk/ to see if there's currently any outage. If pingdom is reporting that the services are up, then the problem is most likely a network issue related to your location and/or ISP rather than a FastMail.FM problem.
If there are any service problems, we will post to our Status Blog with details and updates as we have them.
If pindom and the status blog show that FastMail.FM has no problem, you may have a routing problem between your PC and our server. To check where this occurs, the simple approach for Windows users is to use FastMail.FM's diagnostic tool FastTest.
We suggest that you download FastTest now . To use FastTest, simply double-click it after downloading, and follow the instructions. The output may not mean much to you, but if you send it to us using the FastMail.FM support system it will help us a lot!
If you can't use FastTest (it doesn't work on your system for some reason, or you do not use Windows), you can try the manual approach... Open an MS-DOS prompt (in Windows, by clicking Start->Programs->Accessories->MS-DOS Prompt or Command Prompt) or an XTerm (in Linux/Unix) or a Terminal (in Mac OS X) and type:
-
Windows:
tracert fastmail.fm -
Linux/Mac:
traceroute fastmail.fm
At the point where congestion occurs, you will see one or more '*'s. It is out of our control unless this point is the very last hop, to FastMail.FM. If the traceroute does not show all '*'s in the last line, also try the following commands from the command prompt:
-
For problems with web access:
telnet fastmail.fm 80 -
For problems with IMAP access:
telnet fastmail.fm 143 -
For problems with sending mail through the SMTP server:
telnet fastmail.fm 587
If you are contacting the support team about a problem with connectivity, be sure to include the full results of all of these commands. To copy the output under Windows, drag your mouse over the output while holding down the button, and then press the Enter key to copy it. In an email, press Ctrl-V to paste it. Also, be sure to tell us if you are emailing us about a problem, whether you are behind a firewall, whether you are at work, whether you are using a modem or cable modem or ADSL, and any other information about your setup.
Make sure you're using the correct servername for each service (IMAP/POP/SMTP/etc). See the remote server names and ports page for detailed information.
Our underlying email server is an IMAP server. In the IMAP standard, when you "delete" an item, it isn't actually deleted permanently. Instead, it's simply marked as "deleted". This is often displayed in email clients as a crossed-out email. At this stage, the email still exists in your mailbox, taking up space. It's merely been flagged for deletion. To actually delete the item permanently, you have to "purge" the mailbox. Most IMAP clients have an option in one of the menus or on the toolbar called "purge". This is what permanently deletes the email.
Unfortunately, most people find this a bit counterintuitive. Most people are used to the Macintosh and Microsoft model of "'delete' means 'move to Trash'". So in the web-interface, we have emulated this. When you delete in the web-interface it does the following: copy message(s) to Trash, mark for deletion, purge the mailbox. So this is why we don't display the crossed-out messages - we don't generate them.
Sometimes it can happen that you have deleted a message with an IMAP client but have not yet purged it, and then use the web-interface. In the web-interface, these messages will then be shown as crossed-out in the Mailbox view. You can purge them by choosing "Purge Deleted" from the "Action" menu.
In Outlook Express, you can uncheck View->Current View->Show Deleted Messages to avoid deleted-but-not-purged emails appearing in your view. However, you should purge them from time to time to avoid using more server resources than necessary and possibly going over quota.