Emails and SMTP servers

[Howard Walker]

Email addresses in Actinic:
1. There is one in view/business settings/company /contact
2. There is one in view/business settings/Ordering
3. There are a few possible ones in Business settings/ terms and conditions.

In Advanced/Network setup, there is a setting for Mail (SMTP) Server.

What should this setting be?

Our site is hosted on a microsoft server, latest available type on a new bank of up to date servers.

The SMTP server is "the one provided by your ISP" (commas indicating quotes)

I can send emails to and from any of the email addresses set up on our shopbmw site with no problems using Outlook or similar programs.
In Catalog, if I set the SMTP server to agree with the one provided by our ISP, btconnect, when I do a test email, everything appears to work fine, and we receive an email confirming this at our office. However, customers do not get any confirmations of orders, nor are we able to send out emails to customers.

Is there a relationship between the email addresses entered in various parts of the system, and the SMTP server in network setup?

According to the Actinic help desk, if the SMTP server provided is not one that resides on our hosting company's site, then emails will not work. An on line shop that can not communicate with its customers seems to be of little use, and the lack of this facility is not pointed out in any of the literature supplied prior to purchase.

Has anyone else found this to be the case?
Do hosting companies actually allow customers to use their SMTP servers?
Has anyone found a way round this problem, or is it me that has things set up wrongly.?
All help would be appreciated.

[Darren B]

Hi

Depending on your hosting company depends on the settings you need

we use mail.mydomain.co.uk and it works. but my last hosting company used localhost and it worked.

Post your hosting company and im sure someone here uses them and they could probably tell you or give you host a ring and they should be able to tell you the settings.

Actinic needs to use you SMTP not a third party (i stand to be corrected on this statement)

Cheers
Darren

[NormanRouxel]

[quote]Email addresses in Actinic:
1. There is one in view/business settings/company /contact
2. There is one in view/business settings/Ordering
3. There are a few possible ones in Business settings/ terms and conditions.[quote]

The one in 1. is the main one and is all you need to fill in. The one in 2. is optional and is for an additional copy of the orders. All the ones in 3. ( enclosed in [ and ] ) will be automatically populated with whatever you put in 1. above.

Regarding sending e-mails from Actinic. These are sent via SMTP by Perl scripts on your web site hosts server. It's these that need a working SMTP server. Speak to your hosting company and let them know what these scripts want to do as described above.

Norman

[Howard Walker]

I use UKdomains.com as my hosting company. I have spoken to them at length on the subject, but they do not seem to be able to assist.

[Nick]

Howard

I just had a look at the ukdomains.com support section on their website. Looking at the info they give for setting up email, it looks like they do not provide you with an SMTP server (instead they tell you to use the SMTP server provided by your Internet Access Provider - which is fine for email on your PC, but no help at all when Actinic needs to send email from the server that hosts your site).

Speak to ukdomains again and tell them that the Actinic program needs to be able to use an SMTP server from your website.

If they still can't help, you will have to move to a hosting provider that can. There are plenty of Actinic hosting providers on this forum.

Regards

Nick

[Howard Walker]

Thanks Nick - thats the conclusion that I was coming round to.