Quick solutions to outgoing mail problems

Some ISP's block third party outgoing mail (or SMTP) servers. This can cause head aches for anyone trying to use a professional email address on a budget.

There are several ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who will not allow you to use someone else's (or even your own) outgoing mail server. Principle amongst these are BT and AOL,both of which cause the lion's share of problems we encounter with emails. To be fair, this is caused by the ISPs trying to reduce the amount of junkmail we all receive. While that sentiment may be laudable, we have more problems with our customers not being able to send email than we do with junk mail.

This is because when we provide you with mail services it uses our SMTP servers to send mail by standard. This is purely for convenience, you can use any SMTP server to send email so long as you have permission to use it. In much the same way as you can use any post box to send a letter. However, there are ISPs who take occasional (and sudden) dislike to mail servers.

If you are setting your email using you own outgoing mail server (mail.yourdomain.co.uk) or our roaming SMTP server (smtp.outitgoes.com) and it doesn't work, then the simplest (but not guaranteed) solution is to go into your account settings (see the set up instructions for various email clients, often this is under 'tools' menu). Go to the outgoing mail server settings and change the port to 587 (make sure that you do NOT enabled SSL).

This works on AOL and some other ISPs, but it is not foolproof. This gets around the ISP simply blocking typical SMTP traffic.

If this doesn't work, or your outgoing mail has suddenly stopped working you can use your ISP's outgoing mail server. You will need to enter your account settings and change the outgoing mail server to your ISP's SMTP server. You will probably have to authenticate your outgoing mails, so make sure that 'outgoing server requires authentication'. You will have to change the settings to use the username and password for the email address your ISP provides you with (i.e. youname@btconnect.com etc). Note that this will not work with AOL, as they use a completely different system to everybody else.

Examples of commonly used SMTP servers:

If this doesn't work, we do have a solution, please get in touch help@vector7.co.uk