Can't Send Email

Are you having a problem sending email? If so, you've come to the right place. There are two major causes for this problem, and we can track them down because they occur in different situations.

Say you are sitting at home with your computer connected to your cable modem and you can receive but cannot send email. You may be hooking up a new email account, or you may be using the account you've always used, but suddenly it doesn't send anymore. This is likely a problem with authentication. To fix this, we're going to change outgoing mail SMTP Port 25 to Port 587.

Learn about the Port 25 fix.

Suppose instead that everything works fine when your laptop is at home or in the office, but you cannot send email when you are on the road. This problem is most likely caused by your email service or ISP blocking connections when your computer is not physically connected to their network. To address this, we'll need to look into something called SMTP relay. Setting up an SMTP relay from scratch is no fun, but I will tell you about a very inexpensive and invisible service that numerous Living With Outlook readers use to make this problem go away altogether.

Learn about the SMTP relay fix.

• Go from this "Can't Send Email" page to the Living With Outlook Mail tips page.
• Go from this "Can't Send Email" page to the Living With Outlook Home page.