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NetCFax handles all SMTP sending of emails itself using its own internal
library.
Many of the email configuration
windows allow you to specify a machine name or IP address of your
local network's mail server (SMTP server).
If you have used a machine name,
such as mailserver.mydomain.com and NetCFax fails to resolve this
to an IP address, you should read on.
Normally, networks that host
email and other servers have these set to a fixed IP address, but
others may use DHCP and therefore the IP address of these machines
can change.
To overcome this, all email
systems make a DNS lookup using whatever DNS server(s) are
configured under Window TCP networking on that machine. However,
if all of these are not on your local network, they are almost
certain to know NOTHING AT ALL about your internal machine names.
Internal DNS servers are normally
configured to provide this information, but if you do not have
one, there is still a way to overcome the problem.
Windows supports what is known as
a Name Resolution system, and this is simply a specially formatted
ASCII text file named HOSTS (with NO suffix at all.)
This HOSTS file must be saved in
the Windows\system32\drivers\etc folder
Its format is very simple, it
contains a list of all machine names on your network, one per
line, and after each IP address there is a space or tab and then
the IP address of that machine.
All releases of NetCFax
after v2.72, v3.12 and v3.51 now have additional code added to
force a call to windows to try to resolve a machine name using
this file if the DNS lookup has failed.
Naturally, the HOSTS file system
is only useful if the machines have fixed IP addresses. If
these servers are assigned IP addresses via a DHCP server, then
you will also need a local DNS that is updated by the DHCP
server. These do NOT update HOSTS files.
For more information on how to
create and use these hosts files, please contact your network
consultant or Microsoft. If you want us to help you with
this, we are happy to do so if you pay for a special support
session, as we do not offer what is after all network consultancy
as a part of our free product support system.
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NETCFAX -
Networked fax system