Telnet Question

Awhile ago I became interested in telnet and its uses and while following some tutorials that have been written to help you understand it better I've run into a problem... see when the tutorial asks me to connect to a port (like port 25 for instance) a message comes back saying that the connection failed, it couldn't connect to the port, and it timed out. A bit puzzling, I tried looking through the thread archives to solve this problem but no such hits were there that I could find... I'm using windows XP and have a cable connection to the internet. When using telnet on my OS I have to type "telnet" in the command prompt. Hope that helps and I appreciate any helpful responses, thanks! :cool:

Hate to break it to you, but telnet runs on Port 23, not 25. That might be the problem. If it's not, then post back the problem and I'll do my best to help.

fisrt question where are you trying to connect to ?an out side server or your own box ?

second question whats the message saying when you try to connect is it saying something like to no route to host or connection failed

third question are you sure the port is open when you try to connect

be a little more specific and maybe i could help

Spyder32: you can connect via telnet on virtually any port, whether it be 23, 25, or 6667...

TheRadical: Maybe your connecting to a server that doesn't accept incomming requests via port 23, or 25. Try double checking your typing, or switching to/finding a server which does accept telnet (23) or SMTP (25).

[WebCarnage]: Your right, sorry. I was thinking of something else because I'm used to using putty to connect to something. Because you can do from like Start>Run: Telnet blah.com 80
Sorry about that Web :)

TheRadical: Try making sure that port is open or has the telnet service running.

Ok, first off thanks for taking the time to answer this and for your help thus far...
Prodikal, I believe questions 1 and 3 can be answered by looking at this tutorial which I'm tring to do... here's the site...
www.badconnections.net/telnettut.html
There, now when I go to type in telnet mail.geocites.com 25 it comes up as...
"Connecting To mail.geocites.com 25... Could not open connection to the host, on port 25: Connect failed"
That should answer your second question... again thanks for the help!

Quote:

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telnet mail.geocities.com 25

Let me explain what this does. First when you type in "telnet" that tells your computer to use the telnet service. The next part is the address of a mail server. I am using geocities as an example and as a side note you should know that geocities won't work for this method. To find a mail server that you can do this on, often you just have to keep trying different ones until you find one that works. The third thing the "25" is the number of the port that you will be connecting to on the mail server. After that your screen should look like this:

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^^quote from the website THE RADICAL

looks like you need glasses mate

Quote:

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There, now when I go to type in telnet mail.geocites.com 25 it comes up as...

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posted by THE RADICAL

do i need to say more ?

try searching google for anonymous email servers belive me there are quite a few lists out there

Umm.. I went through ThePreacher's profile and found Badconnection's is his. Either you are ThePreacher or I don't know..

Thanks for your help prodikal haha... I actually do have perfect vison from what I can see (no pun intended...heh) I guess I got frustrated when I tried it first and didn't bother to read the rest...
The moral to this "thread" always read the bottom of the material even if it doesn't work and try not to get frustrated.
Anyway, thanks for the help prodikal and everyone else (spyder & webcarnage) Peace!

I have a question regarding this. I used to spoof mail using telnet (harmless fun with friends) by connecting to my ISP's mail server and going through the whole SMTP thing. Now that I'm at a university, and on a university service, telnet won't let me connect to ANY mail server. I get "the host machine actively refused the connection". Any ideas on why this happens? I use XP (Lord, save me) for my telnet needs.

Ajchez -> it just sounds to me like the college's network admins are a little smarter than those of your ISP. I know if I was running a mail server I wouldn't let just anyone connect to it via telnet.

Exactly what would you do if you were able to connect to the mail server?

It's not just the university server. I have a list of about 15 SMTP servers that I could get onto under a normal ISP, but now that I'm on UniversityNet they all block my connection. I'm never harmful when I do this btw. It's all in good fun with friends only. I'm capable of anything SMTP will let you do, define a sender, a reciever, a subject, a message, etc. You can do the same thing wtih netcat, but netcat won't work either when I try this. I refuse to become a script kiddie and use a mail spoofing program.