Fekkin' e-mail applications

[caddyman]

Well, my PC keeps wanting to install Office 2000 despite the fact I never asked it to (as far as I am aware), and don't have any disks for it. At the sdame time, Outlook Excess now lets me receive mail, but won't let me send.

I got fed up and installed Thunderbird.

That won't let me send, either. I cannot, for the life of me, see what settings I have got wrong on either application. Thank God for webmail until I've worked it out, that's all I can say.

Ho hum.

Well, bed now, I suppose.

Comments

[irdm.livejournal.com]

(a) Thunderbird is just a good choice anyway! S'wot I use.
(b) If you've managed to receive, that's usually the more moody setting.
In Thunderbird, the Outgoing Server dialogue doesn have much to it, so not sure what to advise....

Other than techie things like trying to telnet to port 25 of your mail server and see what it says back....

[romney.livejournal.com]

Obvious things:

Check the firewall, particualry if it turns out you are managing to run two at once (the MS firewall is now on by default in a new XP install, if that's what you've ended up with)

Check that you have configured the SMTP address for outbound mail rather than the POP3 address that is usually for inbound only.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Is it trying to connect to the NTL server if you happen not to be on NTL any more at the new place? Most ISPs will restrict access to their outbound mailserver to their customers only.

[blue-room.livejournal.com]

Mark W: This is true with our account at Clara.net we could get incomming mail but no outgoing. You had to have a dial in account for that for security reasons and stopping spammers using their mail servers apparently.
Give them a ring/e-mail and they should tell you what's up.

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

This is the usual cause of the problem.

As a security measure, to stop their outgoing email servers being used to distribute spam/UCE, most email providers will only allow their outgoing email servers (the SMTP server) to send out email from people who are directly connected to it via that ISP, rather than on a remote connection.

The same doesn't apply for incoming email servers (the POP3 server). In this case, as you are only collecting mail, they'll generally let you pick it up from any connetion, provided you can identify yourself with a user id and password.

So - if you change who you're connecting through (e.g. from a dial-up supplier to a different broadband supplier) you need to set up your outgoing SMTP email server to be one provided by the new connection company - the broadband suplier in this case.

This has the odd looking result that although your email address may still be at your old supplier, the actual server being used to send it out is at a totally different company. Don't worry - this is almost certainly correct.

All you should have to do is find out what the SMTP server that your connection provider supplies you with is called - probably someting like "smtp.ispname.net" and put that into your email software ass the outgoing server for all your email accounts. Leave the previous "pop.emailsuppliername.net" as the address for incoming mail.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

In fact this may cause further problems since there are a good many broadband suppliers who won't let you send outgoing mail through their mail servers unless it has an address of theirs on it. Why, yes, this is (a) not useful, (b) a pain in the neck for people who have a personalised domain of some type, (c) something I've run into on my customers' behalf quite a few times, why do you ask? (BT are the canonical example in this respect. Theoretically you can pay them a few quid -- fifteen or so -- and have your personal domain added to their list of "approved" domains for using their outbound mail server. In practice you pay them money, and nothing happens, because their support people are clueless muppets who are approximately as much use as a chocolate teapot.)

I need tea.

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

*nod* alas too true.

I'm lucky - my broadband ISP had no problems with me using my (several) old ISP addresses.