Elk xep sending email Heads Up Newbies!

mikefamig

Senior Member
I just spent hours getting my shiny new Elk to send a stinkin' email alert so here's the short story for you new guys that may have the same trouble.
 
After some struggling I learned that the XEP was fine with auto DHCP IP assignment and fine with auto DNS on my 2wire router and I was able to communicate with the XEP through ElkRP but unable to send a test email. The problem turned out to be with the email server and was twofold.
 
1
The m1xep does not support SSL/TLS secure mail servers which includes most of the email servers in the USA now. To resolve this I found that GMX.com and smtp2go.com still run non SSL smtp servers and they are free. Sign up for the free service and you are half the way there.
 
2
Elk also was not resolving the smtp server names using static or automatic DNS setup. I still don't know why but I finally got it to work by converting the url alias into the numeric IP address 74.208.5.30.
 
I hope that this can save some of you some time and if you get stuck I'd be glad to share what I;ve learned.
 
Mike.
 
The 2wire modem/residental gateways are a special kind of hell with almost anything IP getting to the outside world.
 
I put the xep in the DMZ and that didn't make the thing work so I can't blame the gateway firewall. I will do some playing to learn more about what's going on there after I get the basic system installed. In the meantime I set a rule for it to send me a good morning email each morning so that I know it's working and to keep the email account alive. In the long run I need to get it to resolve dns names so that I don't lose service when the service moves things around on their end.
 
Mike.
 
You could try using Google's DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 instead of your ISPs.
 
+1 2Wire is junk.
 
wuench said:
You could try using Google's DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 instead of your ISPs.
 
+1 2Wire is junk.
I'm not defending 2wire equipment. We get employee discounts from ATT and the U-verse system really has pretty good content so I have their 2wire gateway in my house. I may bridge to a second router at some point but for now it works.
 
Are those google servers open and free?
 
Mike.
 
Yeah, they are open and free.  My ISP was redirecting bad DNS requests to their own website, which made troubleshooting problematic so I switched to Google's DNS.
 
I tried the Google dns servers this morning and it did correct my problem of resolving the mail server url smtp.gmx.com. This makes me wonder what all else ATT or Verizon or for that matter any other ISP is omitting  from their dns tables and omitting from my internet experience.
 
Mike.
 
There are many posts about email setup and the XEP. Luckily, my provider only requires port 587 but not encryption.
 
There are mixed feelings about whether to use google's DNS servers or the correct ones for your ISP.  With so many things now being delivered via CDN or Content Delivery Networks, having DNS servers that resolve to the closest netflix server for instance may make a huge difference in performance...  that said, if anything does ever fail, I switch to either google or OpenDNS in a heartbeat; then again I'm not far from Google HQ so I can't imagine it hurting much anyway. 
 
The XEP is notoriously bad at DNS and SMTP as well...
 
I too was going to mention the whole Google DNS issue, but decided not to since you found a working resolution in using them.
It just seems everywhere you look these days everyone is so quick to recommend using Google's servers all the time with the simple notion that they are "better."
 
I think that it's fair to say that compared to my ISP's SSL smtp server that does not work at all with teh Elk M1XEP that Googles smtp server is "better".
 
What choices do I have? I can't tell you how disappointed I am in the Elk is not able to communicate with an SSL mail server.  I'm open to suggestions.
 
Mike.
 
I think that I learned something new about the XEP ethernet setup this morning. I said earlier that my ISP DNS servers did not work with gmx.com smtp server based on the fact that setting XEP to acquire DNS automatically did not work. I was assuming that the DNS was in fact being acquired from my gateway automatically. Today I changed the XEP setting to "specify dns addresses to use" and left the address 0.0.0.0 for both primary and secondary dns. I believe that this causes the xep to use the default ISP dns addresses that are on my gateway and everything seems to work.
 
To sum it up I now think that my ISP's dns servers are fine but the xep was failing to acquire them  from my gateway when set to do so automatically.
 
Hope this can help anyone having troube sending email, Mike.
 
The plot thickens........the xep was sending emails for a couple of days when configured 0.0.0.0 dns (see post 13) but then just quit. This morning I entered my ISP's server adresses and it began working again.
 
Can anyone shed any light on how the xep communicates with a gateway? I got it working through a process of trial and error but I'm not confident that it is still going to be working tomorrow. Do we have any U-verse users here that have a dependable setup?
 
Mike.
 
All of my devices use my gateway IP for DNS - which I can then control however I see fit.
With that said, I have DNS running internally which will then forward to my ISP's DNS servers for any unknown queries.
 
Back
Top