Problem with Apple Mail,messages won't send

[zzzuppp]

My partner has a G4 with OS X 10.3.9.
Recently lots of messages have refused to send from her Mail Outbox,resulting in the App beachballing/having to be ForceQuit. Sometimes she gets the following error message:-
'This message could not be delivered and will remain in your Outbox until it can be delivered.
Verify that you have addressed the msg correctly.Check smtp settings in Mail preferences and verify any advanced setup with your system administrator'.

I've tried the following things:-
Repair permissions
Zap PRAM
Rebuild Mailboxes
Tried trashing Mail prefs but when she tries to log in again with the correct details,she gets an 'unable to connect' msg,so we have to drag the old prefs back out of the Trash

Any ideas?

 

[swiftaw]

What smtp server is she using. Some ISP's only allow you to use their smtp server for outgoing mail, so if you aren't using your ISP's smtp server you should try that. Note, this will not change the outgoing mail address, so you don't need to worry about that.

 

[one1]

Try this:

Mail prefs>accounts>advanced tab

Change to port 995

 

[m1ss1ontomars]

My partner has a G4 with OS X 10.3.9.
Recently lots of messages have refused to send from her Mail Outbox,resulting in the App beachballing/having to be ForceQuit. Sometimes she gets the following error message:-
'This message could not be delivered and will remain in your Outbox until it can be delivered.
Verify that you have addressed the msg correctly.Check smtp settings in Mail preferences and verify any advanced setup with your system administrator'.

I've tried the following things:-
Repair permissions
Zap PRAM
Rebuild Mailboxes
Tried trashing Mail prefs but when she tries to log in again with the correct details,she gets an 'unable to connect' msg,so we have to drag the old prefs back out of the Trash

Any ideas?

It's likely your ISP or email provider recently changed the options you need to set to connect to their server for SMTP. Repairing permissions rarely does anything useful, zapping PRAM is completely unrelated, rebuilding mailboxes is useful and nice but also unrelated, and trashing mail prefs would force you to reconfigure mail.

Go to your ISP or email provider's website and follow their instructions for re-setting up Mail.

If I was wrong about this root cause of the problem, then your internet connection may be flakey and Mail isn't consistently able to send off your partner's emails, so they stay in the outbox. When Mail tries to send too many at once, it will overload itself and crash.