Re: OE receives mail but doesn't send


"Kate" <catw34@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1156818339.821808.42780@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

She can
receive but not send Email on Outlook Express. She's received no error
messages and only discovered the problem after a friend wrote to ask
why she hadn't been heard from.

If no error messages were encountered after sending the email, that suggests
that OE was able to contact an SMTP server and hand the message off. In
the simple case, that SMTP server corresponds to your ISP's SMTP server.
However, locally running tools (eg antivirus) can place themselves between OE
and your ISP's server, acting like an intermediary SMTP server. Conceptually,
OE may have handed the message off to such a tool and the latter failed to
forward the msg to her ISP's server. However, if that were the case, that tool
should have displayed some kind of error message. So it is sounding to me
as though the email was probably successfully sent to her ISP's SMTP server.
Which kinda contradicts your first sentence unless this was/is an isolated case.
Can she send an email to herself and receive it? Can she get an email to your
Yahoo account?

If the answer is yes, she should verify she has the right email address for that
friend and try sending another email. Once her ISP's SMTP server has the
message it will try to forward it to the recipient's SMTP server. If there are
immediate fatal errors while doing so she'll quickly get an error message via
email. If the errors are such that retrying makes sense, her SMTP server
will retry for awhile. It may retry for 5 days or whatever before giving up
and emailing a "can't deliver, giving up" msg to her. However, after 4 hours
or whatever it may (should) email her a "having problems, will continue to
retry" msg. If she is just having problems getting email to some people, then
the issue is most likely on their side and they'll need to get involved and
make sure their setup is cool, their ISP isn't having problems or blocking
your friend's [ISP's] email, etc.

If the answer is no, something odd is going on. When you send an email
via OE it gets queued in the Outbox until it is handed off to an SMTP server, afterwhich the message is moved from the Outbox to Sent Items
(if this is enabled which it usually is and should be during testing). If after
sending a test message she sees that it remains stuck in the Outbox, even
after hitting the Send/Receive button, that is something to go on. If that
message appears in the Sent Items folder then OE got rid of it and the
problem is elsewhere. If the message appears in neither or both places,
OE is probably hosed.

.

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