First, my internet and email details:
ISP: Verizon
Email Account: university email (i don’t use my Verizon email)
POP server: pop.jhu.edu
SMTP server: smtp.jhu.edu
Email client: Thunderbird
This setup has been working flawlessly for two years, then tonight i sent a couple of emails out and got the following messages:
Message 1:
Message 2:
The recipients are both people with whom i have corresponded frequently in the past, without incident.
I Googled the error message, and most of the hits revolved around an incident about a year ago when Verizon, for a few days, apparently blocked a just about any incoming email from Europe. I couldn’t fiond anything directly related to my problem, and was especially confused because the email account from which i sent the messages was not even a Verizon account. Also, while one of the recipients is a Verizon account, the other is not.
Not only that, but if i send an email to my wife, who is also on a jhu.edu email account, i don’t get the error message, and she receives the email just fine.
I spent a rather frustrating half-hour or so on the phone to Verizon. The first thing i had to do was try and convince the woman that, given its past two years of problem-free operation, the trouble was unlikely to reside in my use of Mozilla Thunderbird.
She got me to send an email through the web-based version of my email account, and the fact that i got an error message there too finally convinced her that Thunderbird was not the problem.
About half the time on the phone was spent sitting there while she thumbed through the manual trying to work out the problem. In the end, she told me that she spoke to a “Level Three tech” who informed her that Verizon was having trouble with its mail servers.
This partially mollified me, but i also wondered whether this could really be the cause of my problem, given that my own email address goes out through my school’s smtp server, and at least one of my recipients is not a Verizon email address, but a Bell Atlantic email address.
She didn’t seem convinced that this was really the problem either, but she told me that they expected to have the email problem fixed by tomorrow, so i decided to cut my losses and see if it works by tomorrow evening.
Given my explanation of what happened, does her explanation of the cause of the problem sound plausible? Has anyone had experience with these sorts of errors?