Emails are always a part of our daily life. It is one of the best communication medium.

But, what will you do if you are getting an error like “Relaying Denied” in Outlook while sending an email? Many times, despite changing mail settings, the error remains.

That’s why, we often get requests from customers to fix email client errors as part of our Technical Support Services.

Today, let’s understand about relaying denied in Outlook and how Bobcares’ Engineers fix it.

What is Relaying denied in Outlook?

Before proceeding further, we’ll first see details about relaying denied error.

What is Mail relay?

Mail relay is the process of transferring an email from one server to another. It is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that makes this mail transfer possible.

Usually, a mail server will generate a “Relaying Denied” error when an unauthorized user attempts to send an email. If you do not successfully authenticate with your own outgoing mail server before sending the email, then your server will block the email from being relayed on to the recipient’s server.

Similarly, in mail clients like Microsoft Outlook, you may face errors like “Relaying Denied” if authentication is not enabled.

We often see customers having a tough time while setting mail clients properly. Here, let’s see the top problems and how our Support Engineers fix them.

Top 3 reasons for SMTP Relaying Denied in Outlook

From our experience in managing servers, we often see customers experiencing problems when setting up an Email client. And, this further causes relaying denied errors too. Let’s check the top 3 reasons for the error.

• Unknown User, the Outgoing Mail Server fails to recognize the user: – This happens when you type in the username and password incorrectly. As a result, the server identifies the email account as unknown User.

• Sender domain fails to authenticate: –  Often when turning OFF SMTP authentication in Outlook, it results in “Relaying denied” error. In such cases, the mail server logs may show entries like:

Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550-Please turn on SMTP Authentication in your mail client.
550-mail.xxx.example [10.x.x.204]:58133 is not permitted to relay 550 through this server without authentication.

• Emails from the sender are not accepted by the Spam filtering policy of mail server: – The recipient’s server can deny the relay request, if their spam filters have detected the mails as spam.

How we Fix Relaying Denied issue in Outlook

Recently, one of our customers contacted us with the same “Relaying Denied” error. Let’s see how our Support Engineers fixed it through the steps below.

1) Firstly, we began troubleshooting by checking the server mail logs. There we could find entries for the corresponding email account about the unauthorized attempt.

2) Our Support Engineers educated the customer to enter the username and password correctly in Outlook.

3) Additionally, we confirmed with customer about enabling the SMTP Authentication in the Outlook configuration too.

How to enable SMTP authentication settings in Outlook

The steps to enable SMTP Authentication is different for various E-mail Clients. For example, in Microsoft Outlook, the following steps enable it.

1) Open Outlook. Go to Tools -> Account settings
2) Click the E-mail tab >> then select the email account to be modified >>click the Change button
3) Select the “More Settings” button
4) Under “Outgoing Server” tab >> select “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication” >> choose “Use same settings as my incoming mail server.”
5) Click OK.

Fortunately, the same fix applies to similar 550 5.7.1 server errors like:

• Relaying not allowed! Bad sender IP address

• 550 Relaying not allowed

• Unable to Relay

Essentially, the relay deny process enhances mail server security as such. It ensures that only valid mails will make through the mail server.

[ Are you getting error “Relaying Denied” in Outlook while sending an email? We can fix it for you.]

Conclusion

In short, “Relaying denied in outlook” error occurs mainly when there are problems with your E-mail client configuration. Now, we have seen how our Support Engineers figure out the causes of relaying Denied and the steps to solve it.