new macbook, mail times out?!

[whyrichard]

Hello!

I am helping my girlfriend's father set up his new macbook!

he got a new .mac account to accompany his new macbook,

went through all the steps to set .mac up correctly, and he can't send any email... it times out....

how do i set up his mail account to send mail correctly?

thanks,
r.

 

[devilot]

went through all the steps to set .mac up correctly, and he can't send any email... it times out....

Hmm, I know this was for gmail, but I use both gmail and dotmac and I have the same settings for both. Can you give it a try to see if it helps?

 

[mkrishnan]

If you're having problem *sending* but not receiving mail, then the problem is almost -- 99.9% of the time -- because you are trying to use your e-mail provider's SMTP address and your ISP blocks SMTP port traffic everywhere except their own SMTP server. In that 99.9% of cases, what you must do is find out what the SMTP server for your ISP (cable or DSL or whatever provider) is and configure it as the outgoing server for all accounts. Typically it's fine to use unauthenticated, unencrypted, standard port 25 without login.

Making this change will not have any impact on the e-mail addresses -- mail will still appear to come from whatever account you have configured. It just uses a different server.

If you configure the same Macbook to be used elsewhere, you will typically have to set up a new set of SMTP servers because elsewhere will typically also block your outgoing access. Le sigh. Supposedly it fights spam.

 

[swiftaw]

Yeah, what mkrishnan said. Many ISP's don't allow you to use anything but their own smtp server.