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Telnet your email server

Very often it is necessary to test that your SMTP server is working. The simplest 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 Sponsored Links

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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.