Mail.app working nowhere but at home?

[becky280]

I love the convenience of the mail application. However if im at the library or anywhere else using the public wifi, my email never loads so I have to check my mail with safari, a much larger pain in the ass. Why is this happening and how do I fix it?

[Stratification]

Some details on what mail you're checking? I've not had that problem, and I've not seen others here complaining about it, so I see two possibilities:

-If your ISP is providing the e-mail you're checking they may be restricting access to their servers to users that are connected to their network.
-The hotspots you're using may be restricting traffic to port 80 so html pages may be the only thing coming through.

Those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are other possibilities. More detail should help us sort out your problem.

[rshanahan]

Agree, check with your ISP. In my case everything works ok on my network. Outside I can 'get' mail but cannot 'send' mail. I had to enable SMTP authentication to get sending mail to work.

Your ISP might also require different pop3/smtp mail servers for outside or internet access.