How to troubleshoot Invalid SMTP server address in GMS/Analyzer.

How to troubleshoot Invalid SMTP server address in GMS/Analyzer.

Problem Definition.
In the Windows installation of GMS/Analyzer, the error message "Invalid SMTP server address" is returned when the SMTP server is updated.

Steps.
1) Ensure that you can connect to the email server in question from the windows server.

To test the connections between GMS and the mail server, telnet is the easiest tool to use.

    To install Telnet Client
    Click the Start button , click Control Panel, and then click Programs.
    Under Programs and Features, click Turn Windows features on or off. ...
    In the Windows Features dialog box, select the Telnet Client check box.
    Click OK.
    
    To use Telnet to connect to a mail server
    Go to Start, Programs, Accessories and click on Command Prompt.
    In the window that appears type in 
    "telnet <name or IP address of mail server> 25" without the quotes.

    A banner, similar to the following, should be returned.

Check the "real time" anti virus logs for entries of when a process tried to connect to an email server but was blocked. 
To recreate the message, follow the steps above to use telnet to connect to an email server.
If the logs are being populated with messages saying that a mailer was blocked, adding the following program to the exception list will resolve the issue.

tomcat6.exe

It might also be an idea to add telnet.exe to the list to test the connection.


3) If there is a firewall between the GMS/Analyzer machine and the email server, check that are no firewall rules blocking connections to external email servers.
To protect the integrity of mail servers, Network Administrators sometimes only allow a local email server to send and receive email via SMTP from the network and all other hosts on the internal network are not allowed to send SMTP traffic outside of the network.