Some times my e-mail client stop sending e-mail, and i got an error that it is unable to connect to GMX. Then I log in manually on the GMX web page, a captcha verification code is required, when I enter the code, a can enter to my account, and after that my e-mail client is able again to send e-mails through GMX.

What is happening here? It is obvious that the security rule that trigger the captcha is preventing me from connect from my e-mail client. How can I avoid that?

The problem here is that I use an IP Camera for security in my house, so it can send pictures when movement is detected, however if it can not connect to GMX no e-mail with evidence is sent. This is important for security that my camera is always allowed to connect to GMX. I have more than a year using this service and just recently I started to have this problem.

Hi Seguridad,

This is new to me, interesting.

1) What is your email client?
2) From where are you connecting to GMX, US or EU or …?
3) Which GMX server name and port do you use? SSL?
4) When you “ping” the server name, what IP will it resolve to?
5) What is the the full error exactly, I mean all you have, because “unable to connect” is not a security problem at GMX.

6) Logging in to the web page, which URL do you use?
7) I have not heard about the captcha when logging in.
Is this before entering credentials or on entering your personal account (Home)?
8 ) Will the captcha only happen after a connection problem or did you see this kind of verification w/o transmission problems as well?


What MIGHT be the problem is GMX’ SMTP limit per account (my cat says “Nope” ...),
officially the limit is “11 recipients per hour” but it seems they have silently changed that to 25 per hour.
This “silently” could be a bug as well (with GMX everything + more is possible).
Consider the word “recipients” in “recipients per hour”.

So if you camera (got more than one?) fires “excessively” GMX may block the SMTP sending
(but they have a baffling status message for that)
and consequently your account will be blocked from sending also via web interface, again with a status message (pop up).

Read the end of my posting here: http://forum.gmx.com/forum/posts/list/8081.page#35189

But I have not seen or heard about a captcha at log in in this case.
On the contrary, there is no warning when entering the web access until you click at “Send”,
so I’d assume the web interface doesn’t know about the limitation on logging in.

This leads back to my questions,
please report back and try to answer 1-8.

Regards,
Miguel

i just opened an account and i use incredimail and it keeps saying it cant connect. If I go to my mail directly then it will open. This is not why I came here. I have it at:


I switched the SMTP port to 465 and to SSL.

It still does not work. So hiow do i delete my account and will have to find another place that works.

-Actually the client is the software on my IP Camera that connects and send e-mails.
-It connects from US.
-server used mail.gmx.com
-SMTP port 25
- no SSL
- No ping allowed with the camera, however a test e-mail delivers "Success or Fail status"
- to manually log in by web, I use www.gmx.com
- I am asked to enter the captcha code just after I sucesfully enter my e-mail and password.
- After I logged from the webpage, also entering the captcha code, then my camera can send e-mails again.
- My IP camera normally send 5 or more e-mails per hour, sometimes more than 12, using smtp mail.gmx.com and port 25, and I have never received any e-mail about reaching or excedding any limit.
- the account that receives the e-mails generated by my IP camera is on live.com, so I can receive a huge amount of e-mails without a problem.
- My IP changes a lot since my ISP provider give me dinamic IP address.

Gran wrote:Hi Seguridad,

This is new to me, interesting.

1) What is your email client?
2) From where are you connecting to GMX, US or EU or …?
3) Which GMX server name and port do you use? SSL?
4) When you “ping” the server name, what IP will it resolve to?
5) What is the the full error exactly, I mean all you have, because “unable to connect” is not a security problem at GMX.

6) Logging in to the web page, which URL do you use?
7) I have not heard about the captcha when logging in.
Is this before entering credentials or on entering your personal account (Home)?
8 ) Will the captcha only happen after a connection problem or did you see this kind of verification w/o transmission problems as well?


What MIGHT be the problem is GMX’ SMTP limit per account (my cat says “Nope” ...),
officially the limit is “11 recipients per hour” but it seems they have silently changed that to 25 per hour.
This “silently” could be a bug as well (with GMX everything + more is possible).
Consider the word “recipients” in “recipients per hour”.

So if you camera (got more than one?) fires “excessively” GMX may block the SMTP sending
(but they have a baffling status message for that)
and consequently your account will be blocked from sending also via web interface, again with a status message (pop up).

Read the end of my posting here: http://forum.gmx.com/forum/posts/list/8081.page#35189

But I have not seen or heard about a captcha at log in in this case.
On the contrary, there is no warning when entering the web access until you click at “Send”,
so I’d assume the web interface doesn’t know about the limitation on logging in.

This leads back to my questions,
please report back and try to answer 1-8.

Regards,
Miguel

The captcha thingy could be new to GMX’ server farm in the US and may be rolled out to EU in the near future. I did not hear about till now.

But what exactly will trigger the captcha question???

Your answer seems a bit short in the following point, so I’m going to ask again:
8 ) Will the captcha only happen after a connection problem or did you see this kind of verification w/o transmission problems as well?
--> OK, you enter your credentials, will the capcha verification always be there,
also when your camera did not have connection problems before?
You may have to disable the camera to check this, and log out / in several times.

What I want to find out is if the camera “connection problems” happen and as a result GMX sets a flag to have you verify your account (by the captcha).
You wrote: “… after that my email client is able again …” so this would point to problems when connecting GMX, and GMX thinking about fraudulent connection attempts - but I want to make sure this / our assumption is true.

So your email client is the camera software
If you hit the SMTP limit the GMX server will not send you an email but return an error code + text in the SMTP transaction, you’d need a good email client to read the message (see my above linked posting).

Your camera’s “connection error” message could be translated from Vietnamese to Chinese and to English using Google translate, the true cause could be anything from camera hardware / firmware, your computer / anti virus / network / router / provider to GMX.
No chance to find out without reading the SMTP commands from a log file or a network capture.
< Yea, you may not have changed anything, but think about automated updates and that everything, especially software (settings), will break from time to time >

Changing sender IP is not a problem.

But fact is:
Without any “trigger” the GMX (SMTP) server would not think about abuse or have any reason to flag your account as a security risk.
This trigger is definitely caused by your camera…
--> This is a blatant assumption, as it could be your mobile, your friend, a virus, …
or anything and anybody misusing your (the same) GMX account !!!

To find out if your account is blocked from sending because of too many SMTP messages
(the SMTP limit, remember: 11 recipients per hour):
You need to wait for the connection problem,
then immediately to log in (with captcha) to your account
and try to send an email message.
If it’s the limit you will see a pop up in the web interface (see my above linked posting) and the message will not be sent.

Regards,
Miguel

Yesterday after I logged in one time using the captcha, I was not asked again for a captcha code on subsequent logins during the day.

Not doing anything different, today after placing my username and password, the captcha was there again but this time I took a printscreen so you can see the message.

The camera firmware has not been updated never, and it doesn't have the ability to autoupdate.

I will have to disable the security cameras for 1 day just to verify if the GMX is showing an error with my cameras, if that is the case then I will have to change of SMTP provider. Also I am thinking seriously about that because the help support has not responded my e-mail.

Thanks for the captcha info.

??? No, I didn’t think about camera but anti virus and OS updates.
The camera may have a (hardware? ) problem and trigger too many messages now.

My two cents:
For a security system I’d not recommend any free service, let alone GMX.

Regards,
Miguel

well, thanks... I will change the service and run away from gmx

New mail user. Signed up for the non-ssl smtp feature. Also having login problems...Edited...never mind, my own fault...incorrect setup. Thx.

I am also having problems with client SMTP. I am using SeaMonkey (like Thunderbird, also a project of Mozilla). I receive POP mail without any problems (using secure or non-secure modes), but since sometime last year (about July or August), I cannot send any SMTP messages whatever the settings I change it into.
There is this message: "Connecting to mail.gmx.com", then after a few moments: "Sending of message failed. The message could not be send because the connection to the SMTP server mail.gmx.com timed out. Try again or contact your network administrator."
By the way, I also have another e-mail account from another provider, (not from my ISP) both POP and SMTP of that service are working great using secure and unsecure modes on the same application.

Hi kipperoo,

What you say sounds strange because GMX SMTP server is working for thousands, all year round.

OK, some are not able to use it from some countries / provider (usually traceroute > 200ms).
And very few have an account related issue … (also see the timeout message). Hmmmm...

So first I’d assume it’s the setting (use mail.gmx.com port 465 with SSL).
Log in with your full email address, authentication required (plain).

Please report back here.

Regards,
Miguel

Hello, I am getting the same problem.

About 2 weeks ago it came up in my IMAP client that I was blocked for abuse, I logged in via the web and the captcha came up. After entering this I was permitted to use my client again.

I thought that was a one-off and thought nothing else of it, last week I couldn't send emails again so logged in and got the captcha, once I cleared that I can send again.

Seems unusual that all of a sudden this is an issue, I think there's a gremlin in the works at GMX.

Hi Linda,

They have a lot of bugs, but I never saw a gremlin at GMX

OK, the “Yellow And Red Account Blocking Bug” (YARABB) is an ancient, very well known fellow here.

GMX call it their “Security Manager” (read: “Security Damager”).

It will hit your account once and - in most of the cases - the account is lost, because there are so many hits and they have to thoroughly check each and every account, that takes time, you know …
(check with GMX Facebook, Wall and Discussions).

But as far as I know the captcha thingy --- this isn’t YARABB.


More likely it is a different, still unknown bug at GMX.

There is a small possibility, though, that there is a “suspicious” activity (my cat denies)

1) either with your account’s SMTP access (e.g. someone trying to guess the password to your email address, veeery unlikely, I bet GMX wouldn’t care)

2) or with someone using the same provider and having a similar IP address
(very often not only one particular address is in the focus of a - bad - Blacklist Policy).

The latter would very likely end in YARABB, so I assume we’re back at a new bug ...

Regards,
Miguel

For the last couple of days I have had problems either sending or receiving mail via GMX. These problems are intermittent and disappear after some time.

The issue is apparent via Outlook 2010 (IMAP, via Time Warner cable) and also via Android mail client (also IMAP, TMobile data).

I verified account info (which has not changed) and have no problem connecting via web browser. Only via IMAP clients.

At this moment I cannot send anything via GMX.

Andy243 wrote:For the last couple of days I have had problems either sending or receiving mail via GMX. These problems are intermittent and disappear after some time.

The issue is apparent via Outlook 2010 (IMAP, via Time Warner cable) and also via Android mail client (also IMAP, TMobile data).

I verified account info (which has not changed) and have no problem connecting via web browser. Only via IMAP clients.

At this moment I cannot send anything via GMX.

I see the same issue. I am using Outlook 2007. I can no longer send messages with Outlook. I have had to use the web browser interface to send.

The log in problems from my account do not seem to be intermittent. I have tried many times today with the same result.