Office 365 Email Connectivity Tips

Hello, I want to share an experience that I hope helps someone in the future. one of my clients, SewISaid.com, called an said their email stopped working. I use PostSMTP for all of my projects, it just keeps things simple to configure AND I get an Email Log that I can inspect when issues like this arise.

The customer centralizes all email sending/receiving via Office365. Per the PostSMTP email log, I saw on 3/24/22 4:33p, email attempts began reporting “Incorrect Authentication Data”, so of course, I immediately check the customer’s M365 Account/Password to ensure nothing has changed and that it still had Authenticated SMTP privileges enabled. Nothing changed.

I missed the PostSMTP Connectivity Test Warning that showed the Server ID was now namehero.net NOT office365.com. So at this point, I knew this was not a problem with M365 or with the PostSMTP Plugin … had to be something with the Web Host Provider.

I opened a Support Ticket with snippets from the Connectivity Test, and you guessed it, they said it was an Office 365 issue and to contact their support. I responded with PostSMTP’s Email Log that showed this was all working just fine until 3/24/22 at 4:33p CDT. And I also pointed out the SMTP requests are NOT going to smtp.office365.com rather to their namehero.net server. So something has changed, but it was within NameHero.

NameHero’s Level III tech replied and asked me to test email again, and everything was working. He said a cPanel upgrade apparently enabled SMTP Restrictions unbeknownst to them and they whitelisted the customer’s cPanel Username, so this shouldn’t be an issue going forward.

So what’s the morale to the story? Use PostSMTP to manage your WP websites email. It saved me so much time not only to setup, but to troubleshoot issues like this quickly. … and I guess the other positive is my customer no longer questions the cost of my website maintenance/support agreements. 🙂 There will always be issues after a website is developed and delivered.

Big Thanks to the PostSMTP Development Team for creating such a useful and valuable plugin.