attglobal subscribers: if you have their premium plan (I do, $25 per month) you can
perform all mail transactions via web interface.   You also get access
to att wifi for nothing.   this system works very well for me almost everywhere
in the world

jeffrey race

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:22:56 +1000, Ed Durrant wrote:

Julian Thomas wrote:

After a great Warpstock X in Windsor (many thanks to Lewis and all the
rest of the folks who made it such a great event) we hit the road towards
Niagara-on-the-Lake where we had planned a birthday dinner for MJ.  We
made good time (somewhere between what googlemaps thought was the
acceptable time and what Edgar suggested as his best time :-).  Ended up
at a Hilton Garden Inn there.

First of all, the wireless wouldn't connect.  XWLAN said that it was
trying to establish the connection (don't remember exactly what) but it
had a good signal and the hilton SSID.

So I switched to wired (they had both in the rooms) and it got through
with no problems - until we tried to send email.  It didn't go - I tried a
telnet to my SMPT servers on port 25 and neither of them connected.  Tried
port 2525 (suggested as an alternate by my hosting service to access their
relay server) and it seemed to go through.  Unfortunately my mailer -
MR2ICE doesn't allow setting an alternate SMTP port.

Looks like these guys are blocking any access out of their little world to
port 25.

HGI is part of the Hilton empire, and we've never had these problems from
the Hampton Inns (our usual choice in that empire).

If I get a round tuit in the days to come, I will send them a blast email;
the desk clerk seemed quite clueless about this situation.....

 

You'll probably find some local supplier has installed it for the hotel and they won't know how it works. Blocking e-mail traffic is not unusual on hotspots I have found, so it's useful if you have a webmail interface on your e-mail server (or your service providers if you're not running your own mail server).

It's also possible that the WiFi access point was using WPA, but this would be strange, but that would explain why you could see the SSID but not connect.

Cheers/2

Ed.