Brion Vibber wrote: I am using gmail with pop support gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com pop.gmail.com I push the send button and I get a message saying "an error has occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: you are not allowed to send mail to <wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org> Please verify that your mail adress is correct in your mail preferences & try again" Yes See above No They do not progress any further I will try to send this one as a reply .. That does not work, however I can send a reply from within the webmail client. Now the thing is I have always been able to send mail through my Thunderbird installation. It is only since a couple of days that I have problems both with Wikitech and Foundation. Thanks Brion :) The e-mail adress is the one I am sending this from

On Apr 10, 2005 8:38 AM, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Note that this is an *incoming* mail-server. Your client will be sending mail *out* through a different server, which I'm guessing is the one provided by your ISP or some other server you use to connect. Meanwhile, on Apr 10, 2005 1:45 PM, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: Aha, that could be the problem - note that GMail's instructions refer to you using smtp.gmail.com (http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13285 step 10 onwards). That would make sense, because GMail does publish an SPF record, and you are sending through the "wrong" server. The "correct" way round that (according to SPF advocates) is to set up multiple SMTP servers in your mail-client - if Thunderbird's interface is similar enough to the one in Mozilla-MailNews, you'll need to click "Advanced..." under "Outgoing Server" to add it, and then again under the "Server Settings" page of your GMail account settings to use it. To digress somewhat: As you may have noticed in the last paragraph, I don't count myself as an advocate of SPF - it's heart is in the right place, but it seems to break as many legitimate "tricks" of the e-mail system as genuine abuses. I had to argue with my ISP for a couple of weeks to stop them silently rejecting messages forwarded through a private domain (yes, I should really be telling the forwarder to change, but SRS looks even uglier to me). Anyway, suffice to say that if someone *has* set up an SPF filter on the Wikimedia servers, I wonder if it should be set to be less strict, at least until such a time as more/most people have unbroken the things SPF breaks. [On a really technical note, GMail's SPF record seems to define "everything else" as "neutral" not "fail"; it seems odd to me that this should result in such stern rejections but I guess I don't really know the mechanics - "v=spf1 a:mproxy.gmail.com a:rproxy.gmail.com a:wproxy.gmail.com a:zproxy.gmail.com a:nproxy.gmail.com ?all"] [Now it will probably turn out to be something completely unrelated, and I'll look like a right ninny for ranting on. Ah, well...] -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]