• We value your experience with Plesk during 2024
    Plesk strives to perform even better in 2025. To help us improve further, please answer a few questions about your experience with Plesk Obsidian 2024.
    Please take this short survey:

    https://pt-research.typeform.com/to/AmZvSXkx
  • The Horde webmail has been deprecated. Its complete removal is scheduled for April 2025. For details and recommended actions, see the Feature and Deprecation Plan.
  • We’re working on enhancing the Monitoring feature in Plesk, and we could really use your expertise! If you’re open to sharing your experiences with server and website monitoring or providing feedback, we’d love to have a one-hour online meeting with you.

Question How to use SSL for mail insatead of STARTTLS?

TurabG

Basic Pleskian
Hi,

I have set an SSL for mail and done settings properly. I can use my mail from outside through SMTP. But as far as I can see, it forces to use STARTTLS. There is a web client I have to use which is not compatible with STARTTLS and it has to use SSL. I don't see a place to set it in Plesk. Do I have to do it manually and if so, how can I?
 
Hi Dave. Thanks for the response. I think I didn't make it clear enough. This is not a port issue as far as I can see. When I test it through telnet, it still asks me to issue STARTTLS first.
 
Dave is correct

Your server will offer StartTLS on port 25 and 587 for SMTP, 110 for POP3 and 143 for IMAP
On the ports 465, 993 and 995 however, you are forced to use an SSL/TLS connection before issuing any commands.
 
Hi again. I do not think this is a port issue as I said before. Because, SMTP on port 587 with STARTTLS works very well but on port 465 with SSL gives auth failure with the same credentials. That means, if I configure a mail client with STARTTLS on port 587, it works but without changing any other thing I set the client to use SSL on port 465, it can not send mails.

Edit:
I found out the reason I think. I am typing the server IP address for auth address. Although it works with STARTTLS; it won't with SSL as it is complaining that the SSL name "domain.com" is not equal to the IP address. THe reason I am typing IP address instead of the domain is because the domain is behind Cloudflare and it wouldn't allow SMTP on free plans.

As a workaround I added an A record to Cloudflare DNS like "smtp.domain.com" to point to the server's IP address with "DNS Only" (i.e "Not proxied") but it didn't work. Now some clients still give auth error but some clients now say; "Expected response code 354 but got code "554", with message "554 5.5.1 Error: no valid recipients"
 
Last edited:
Then you should open a ticket with support becuase it should work on 465 with SSL as long as you are connecting to the domain name in the SSL.
 
Back
Top