How My Daughter Repaired My "Can't Send Email" Problem

Don't you just hate it when your kid displays how much more intelligent than you she is? I am rather competent with computers, but my kid is studying computer science in college. So guess who I talk to when I have computer concerns. Like the need to change outgoing (SMTP) email settings.

Back to the story. I was visiting my daughter while trying to also do all my regular work at the same time. However I couldn't send messages. I received it normally, but couldn't transmit it. I thought perhaps I would merely use my Gmail account to send messages, but that would be awkward and reveal the fact that I was doing something different.

My boss is more than a little old fashioned, and it still upsets himstill not quite happy with the idea} that the corporation lets people work from home regularly to save energy. The idea of me being halfway across the country would have really set him off.

So I was already perspiring heavily by the time I talked to my kid. She laughed at me and said we just needed to correct my outgoing (SMTP) email options. She explained to me that there organizations are changing the way they handle messages sent into their networks from the outside to preclude spamming, and phishing, and malware attacks.

As a result, we had to go into Outlook's Account settings page and change the options on my email account. Explicitly, I had to sign up with an SMTP relay service. They would enable Outlook to connect to their server no matter where I was physically located. After that we had to change the "Outgoing mail server (SMTP)" settings to use the service's SMTP server in place of my previous one.

Once that was set up, Outlook would receive email from my regular email server like always, but transmit it through the new SMTP relay. As far as anybody else would be able to see, nothing had changed (my email address was the same before and after), but now I would be able to send from anywhere on Earth that had an Internet connection.

Of course I had practically no idea what she was talking about, but she walked me through figuring out exactly what the issue was and fixing it. We got my electronic mail fixed in 20 minutes while sitting in her dorm room!

My kid isn't on hand to help you with your email troubles (she's got learning to do) but if you're tired of this sort of trouble, I strongly recommend this speedy and easy guide for figuring out why you can't send email and fixing the problem in minutes.