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LMi.net Email
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• When I try to send mail, I get an error message that says "we do not relay"
• How do I setup a vacation message on my email?
• How do I change my email password?
• I can't get into my e-mail account now because it says there's some pop.lock thingy. What's up with that?
• There's an e-mail that's stuck on the mail server that's keeping me from downloading the rest of my messages. What can I do?
• How can I send email with my laptop while traveling using Outlook (or Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc.)?
• Someone told me they can't send me email because LMI's filters are blocking them. What do i do?
• I'm getting email notifications that messages I sent are undeliverable for messages that I never sent.

This error will come up when you try and use our outgoing mail server (smtp.lmi.net) from outside of our network. You must be connected to LMI (via dial-up, DSL, or a T1 line) to use our SMTP server. This is to prevent spammers from abusing our servers. Almost every responsible ISP will have this same policy.

If you are not connected to the LMI network, please use whatever SMTP server your ISP provides you for sending email. For example, if you are getting access from AT&T, you outgoing mail server might be "smtp.sbcglobal.net".

This will not effect your ability to receive email- you can access our POP servers from anywhere.

If you are not able to use another SMTP server, you can always use LMi Webmail to send and receive email from any web browser.

Note for LMI roaming customers:
If you are connected using one of our nationwide dial-up access numbers, please use the "smtp2.lmi.net" as your outgoing mail server.

Please send an email to support@lmi.net, and provide us with the text you want automatically sent out to anyone who emails you. When you return from your vacation, then send us another email and we will remove the vacation auto-reply.

At this time, you cannot change the password for your POP mail account. Please call us and we can change it for you.

When you check your e-mail, a lock is placed on your mail spool to keep it from getting corrupted. This POP lock usually goes away after you're done downloading your e-mail. If you are disconnected, if you accidentally hit "check mail" more than once, if you have another mail client and/or another computer trying to check your mail at the same time, this will usually generate a pop.lock error and cause this lock to persist for about 5 minutes. Some mail clients make this look like a password problem, but others (like Eudora) actually report it as a pop.lock problem. The only way to safely get through a POP lock is to wait at least a full 5 minutes before checking your mail again. If you are impatient and try to check your mail beforehand, you will reset the timer and you will have to wait another 5 minutes on top of that.

There are a few different things you can do. First, realize that if you're on a dial-up account and somebody has sent you a 5MB e-mail with a bunch of pictures, it will take probably about 20 minutes or so to download just that one message. Ask that person to send you pictures one at a time in the future, or put them on a web site for you to view at your leisure. Second, if you're sure you don't want to wait around for the download, you can exit your mail program and log into our webmail interface and delete the message in there. Third, if you're comfortable with telnet (Windows machines come with telnet.exe installed by default - 'start -> run -> telnet pop.lmi.net 110' but you will probably have to install a telnet application like NCSA Telnet on a Mac), this is what WE do to fix the problem when you call in.
PLEASE NOTE: This method is unsupported and we hold no responsibility for loss of e-mail by using this method! If you are not familiar with telnet and unix servers, please do NOT do this - call in and have us do it instead!
telnet pop.lmi.net 110 - this logs you into the POP port of our mail server
user lmiusername - of course, substitute lmiusername with your user name. This is usually the first part of your lmi.net e-mail address, before the @ sign.
pass mypassword - substitute your password for mypassword. Remember, unix systems are case-sensitive.
If you typed everything in correctly, you should be logged in. Now comes the fun part. Type in list. This will show all the messages sitting on our server and their size in bytes. Take a look at the first few lines of the first message. You can do this by typing 'top 1 5' without the quotes. You can usually get an idea from this who the offending e-mail was from and what the subject was. You can view more of the message by increasing the number 5.
Now that you're sure which of those e-mails is the culprit, you can delete it with the command dele 1. That will delete message #1. Change the number if you want to delete other messages.
When you're done, type quit and that's that.
Now you're hacking with the pros. ;)

You can request a "roam" account from us that will enable you to send email using authenticated SMTP from wherever you use your laptop. Once we setup the account, you can use "roam.lmi.net" instead of "smtp.lmi.net" as your outgoing mail server. Call or email us at email us at support@lmi.net to request a roam account.

Certain machines on the Internet that have been identified as open relays or major sources of spam or viruses are blocked from sending mail to our network, in an effort to reduce the volume of junk email received by our customers. We use several highly reliable internal and third-party filters; still, every now and then mistakes happens, or our customers' correspondents may be forced to use suspect mail servers.

To fix this problem, it is our general policy at LMi to unblock any server if one of our customers is not getting email they want. In order to do this, we need to know the exact IP address of the server sending this email. The easiest way get us this information is to ask the person that is trying to send you email to forward the rejection error notice that they received to help@lmisupport.com, and we will promptly unblock them.

What you're seeing are bounce messages from forged headers sent in spam or viruses, called "backscatter".

Note that it does *not* mean someone has "hijacked" your email; merely that someone is lying about the reply-to address for emails they're sending out.

Backscatter is most commonly seen as an effect of the "W32." family of virus. These (like many viruses) attacks Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. The way it works is this: A computer becomes infected when the user opens an email that contains this virus. This computer will then mail out copies of the virus to a list of email addresses generated from the address book of the infected computer. It then selects another email address from the inbox of that same computer and uses it as the return address. So the email appears to be coming from someone else. Many email systems are now protected against this virus, so some of the emails that the infected computer is sending out are rejected by the recipients server, and bounces back to the sender, which in this case appears to be you!

So by getting these messages, it does not mean that your computer is infected, just that you have probably sent email to someone else who's computer WAS infected. It is a good idea to periodically scan your own computer for viruses using an updated copy of a virus utility. This is especially true if you use Microsoft email client software.