my anti-virus (norton) does not scan outgoing e-mail. how do you check for
"spam" filters?
also I reset it again yesterday and now it does not send to my live.com
account. I am letting the computer configure the settings.
Many months ago, maybe even a year ago, I trialed McAfee's suite and
found that they run a local proxy that pretends to be the mail server to
the e-mail client and pretends to be the client to the mail server.
That is, your e-mail client never connects to the real mail server but
instead to their local proxy. Rather than interrogate your e-mail
traffic a byte at a time, they accept the entire e-mail to interrogate
it all at once. Your e-mail client gets an +OK status back on sending
your e-mails but that status came from McAfee's proxy pretending to be
the mail server, not from your real mail server. After McAfee is done
with its interrogation, it pretends to the be e-mail client and connects
to the mail server to complete the send operation. It is possible that
their proxy screws up during its send operation but you'll never know it
back in your e-mail client. Your e-mail client got an +OK status back
from their proxy so your e-mail client is through with it send
operation. To see if McAfee's proxy screwed up when it got around to
sending your message to the real e-mail server, you have to go look at
McAfee's logs.
The above is why I mention disabling the e-mail scanner in your
anti-virus program. Besides the typical problem of causing timeouts
between the e-mail client and the mail server, McAfee usurps the role of
each to grab the other end of the connection, so if their proxy fails to
send then you won't know about it in your e-mail client.
It's been even longer since I used any Norton products. The last time I
used their Internet suite, I found their transparent proxy would
sometime go unresponsive. Disabling the e-mail scanner in their AV
product did not help because all the e-mail traffic was still routed
through their proxy. Their proxy wasn't interrogating the traffic
anymore but it wasn't passing it through, either. The simple solution
was to reboot to force a new load of their proxy to get a responsive
instance of it. At that time, I did figure out a couple of batch files
that would kill some processes and stop some services for NAV and then
restart them (which had to be done in the proper order); however, since
I don't use their products anymore, I didn't keep those batch files
around. So I'd suggest rebooting to see if the problem goes away.
Disabling an e-mail scanner doesn't necessarily get it out of the way.
In the past, Norton disabled the interrogation but all e-mail traffic
still went through their proxy. If their proxy was dead, so was your
e-mail traffic. You have to uninstall the product and then to a custom
install that excludes their e-mail scanner component. The same is true
for AVG.
So first try a reboot (not a hibernate and resume which some branded
computers will do when you hit their fake "Power" button). You need to
fully shutdown Windows and then start it again. If that doesn't work,
uninstall the AV program and then do a custom install but exclude any
e-mail scanning feature.
There is one test you could do before you go rebooting your computer or
doing a custom reinstall of software: test if your e-mails are getting
sent out by Comcast. Have an e-mail account on a different domain, like
Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or the like (they're free). Send a test e-mail
to a recipient that has, so far, not received your e-mails. In that
test e-mail, Bcc yourself a copy to that non-Comcast domain account. If
you get a copy of your test e-mail in that other account then Comcast
*is* sending your e-mails which means the problem is on the recipient's
end.
