I Receive Email But Cannot Send it Out - Why?

Ask any network administrator what is the most frequent customer question, and the likely answer is email.

The most popular email method uses two different services that work together, called POP and SMTP. POP (Post Office Protocol) receives email, and SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) sends email. Most people don't have trouble receiving email, and when they do it's usually because someone sent them a huge file, but problems with sending email are far more common.

This is because the majority of large Internet service providers have set up safeguards in an effort to limit the amount of unsolicited email on their networks. Unfortunately, these safeguards often cause problems for legitimate users. For example, Cablevision's Optimum Online service, will only allow outgoing email using its own SMTP server, mail.optonline.com, which works on the default SMTP server setting,TCP port 25.

So if you tried to send out email from your company laptop on an Optimum Online without using the Optonline SMTP server, your email would be stuck in the outgoing mailbox and you will probably get error messages referring to the SMTP server.

Changing the SMTP address in your email program is a straightforward process. If you are using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, locate "Tools" from the top menu and then select "E-Mail Accounts" or "Accounts" depending on the version you are using. Then select the email account you want to access. Next hit the "Change" button and you will see the text area where you can change the SMTP address. (Note that all versions of Outlook and Outlook Express have different layouts, but the SMTP settings is always found in the "Tools > Accounts" menu.)

In the case of Optimum Online, we will need to the change the SMTP address to "mail.optonline.net". We also had to click on the "More Settings" button, which opened up a tabbed menu, from which we selected the "Outgoing Server". We then selected thecheck box next to "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication" and below it choose the radio button for "Use the same settings as my incoming mail server."

Almost every major ISP, including Verizon, Time Warner, Earthlink, requires a similar configuration. You can usually find out how to configure Outlook by looking in the support section of the ISP's website. (To no surprise, the sections covering email are usually very extensive and include screenshots.) or by calling the ISP's support department.

A problem with using the ISP's email settings is they will only work when you are on that network. If you decide to bring your laptop to Starbucks or the office, you will need to change the SMTP configuration again.

But there is a way to work around the SMTP issue. Google allows Outlook users to send and receive email using POP and SMTP with its Gmail service. Gmail avoids the default SMTP port 25 used by all the bigISPs and instead uses TCP port 465 for SMTP. For incoming email using POP, Gmail uses TCP port 995 rather than the standard TCP port 110.

Gmail accounts are free and also have excellent spam filtering. If you need a second personal email account of if you want to switch your primary email to another provider and not have worry about whether you can send and receive email on a certain network, Gmail is an excellent choice.

So the next time, you plug your laptop into a new network and start getting email errors, the first place to look is the SMTP settings.

This is a list of SMTP settings for a few of the larger ISPs.

Time Warner (Roadrunner) smtp-server.nyc.rr.com
AT&T imailhost.worldnet.att.net (DSL) mailhost.att.net (Dial-up)
Comcast smtp.comcast.net
EarthLink smtpauth.earthlink.net
MSN secure.smtp.email.msn.com
Mindspring mail.mindspring.com
Netzero smtp.netzero.net
Optimum Online (CableVision) mail.optonline.net
Verizon outgoing.verizon.net or smtpout.verizon.net

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