Version: unspecified (using KDE 4.5.90) OS: Linux I'm using KMail 4.6 beta 3 and until just a moment ago I had problems with sending e-mail over my GMail account. KMail would fail to send e-mail through the GMail SMTP server, giving me a pop up with an error message containing text like 'E-mail sending failed: failed to transport message. Socket operation timed out' I also noticed that auto detecting settings for the SMTP server took a very long time. First I took a look at bug #261333 and concluded that KMail was not to blame. Then I verified if my settings were correct and noticed that I had entered smtp.google.com instead of smtp.gmail.com. Silly mistake, but once corrected KMail worked fine with GMail. I assume this also explains why the autodetection took so long, because I had the wrong server. I think KMail itself could improve on this part by communicating clearly that it couldn't find an SMTP server at the wrong address, the autodetect function could have also warned me that it couldn't find an SMTP server there instead of failing silently and doing nothing. An error message like 'Socket operation timed out' isn't going to be understood by users. Reproducible: Didn't try
How we can detect that it's not a smtp server ?
To be honest I don't know, but I suspected that if a mail client sends some requests to an SMTP server, for example credentials to log in, the SMTP server should answer that request according to the SMTP protocol. If that is not the case, doesn't that lead to the conclusion that either the address is invalid, the server at that address is not an SMTP server, or that the SMTP server at that address is temporarily down. If it's not possible to determine that it's not an SMTP server, maybe the error message could be made more helpful: 'The server could not be contacted at this address, verify if the address is correct or try again later' or something like that.