"My mail won't send..."

April 12, 2004

A client brought a brand new PowerBook to me to have his data migrated onto. After hunting down and copying over various data files, etc., and performing the installs and tweaks necessary, I gave a perfectly working PowerBook back to my client.

Two hours later the phone rings and my client tells me he can't send email out. A quick check of his SMTP server seems Ok. The message itself seems Ok. He says he can receive mail just fine. Since I can't get over there again that day, we leave it for the next. I secretly hope it will go away.

The next day, no dice. We tinker with settings some more, but no good. Oh, and now his incoming email seems to be jammed up. Bah. I head over there and the first thing I notice is that everything is slow. I look at the network cable, and it appears to be a bit kinked. So I pull the network cable, and put it back in, but no real change. I move the laptop to another location and the outgoing mail immediately goes; but the incoming mail is still slower than it seems it should be.

Meanwhile, another user is having problems printing. Hmmm.... we did have thunderstorms over the weekend. So I took a quick trip to the wiring closet and powered down and up the network switches. Bingo, everything worked fine. The kinked cable still needed to be replaced, but after that things went back to normal speeds.

Two lessons: 1) never underestimate the power of a simple solution; 2) just because you've found one problem, doesn't mean that you've found them all.