Because my hosting comapny (IXWebhosting) blocks PHP’s mail() function, I have not be able to receive any email notification from my blog since then, it is one of the reasons I am thinking about switching to a new hosting company. But anyway, I found a WordPress plugin (WP Mail SMTP) that will enable me to use SMTP to send out emails, so I downloaded and installed it in my blog. It worked very well until I tried to send an email to my Live email account, say jeffrey@live.com (this is a fake email), the plugin’s SMTP debug information shows as follows:

SMTP -> FROM SERVER:
550 sorry, no mailbox here by that name (#5.1.1)
SMTP -> ERROR: RCPT not accepted from server: 550 sorry, no mailbox here by that name (#5.1.1)

SMTP -> FROM SERVER:
250 flushed

The interesting but puzzling things is that it only happens when the email goes to a Live.com email address; emails to Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Inbox mail can all go through without any problems. I posted a question on Windows Live Help web site and am waiting on their response, and you will need to have a Windows Live ID in order to view the question.

At the mean time, I changed my SMTP settings to use GMail’s SMTP settings, then all emails go through fine. Maybe my hosting company’s SMTP server is on the blacklist of the Live email system?

UPDATE (8/14/2009)

After several requests, my hosting company’s help desk staff finally escalated my support ticket to their server administrators. The server administrators then found the problem and fixed it. It was caused by the wrong configuration of the mail script in my account. Now everything is fine and problem solved.