Why can't I send email?!?!

One question that we seem to get more and more is 'Why can't I send email'. Receiving email is typically fine, but sending email just doesn't work. If you're a road warrior, business owner, frequent business traveller or an iPhone owner, read on. If you have any questions or if you're having trouble that we can help with, certainly don't hesitate to contact us.

Ok, so you've got your cell phone (with the office phone forwarded to it) and your wi-fi enabled laptop and you're off to the races as a road warrior. To test things out, you swing by the local coffee shop or I nternet Cafe to test things out, and you're good to go. You hit the road ready to change the world. You'll finally be able to get home at a decent hour and, after dinner with the family and some play time with the kids, you'll finish up a little work before going to bed. All is going well, until you try to send email . It was working before, and you can receive email just fine, but you're unable to send. It's 10:00pm, and you don't want to call the company IT guy, so you call your ISP (Internet Service Provider). After waiting on hold, you're finally connected to Bob, the Customer Relations Engineer from Texas that says 'and thank you for that' with a peculiarly non-Texan accent every time you say anything. Bob tells you that he sees the problem and then happily walks you through changing your email settings to use the ISP's mail servers, which works. You get your email out and go to bed, excited that you're n ow a road warrior, the world is your oyster. You wake up the next day, get ready, and hit the road, excited at what this new day may bring. You get to a customer site, sell the deal, and all you need to do is email the details of the deal to corporate, but there's a problem. That problem that you were having with your email last night, it seems to have come back. Only now, it's a different ISP. Perhaps it's a problem with this new ISP. Perhaps their corporate IT guy has things locked down, and you just can't send it from there. No problem, you'll swing by the coffee shop or Internet Cafe that you used earlier, you know it works from there. Unfortunately though, no dice. Same problem....

The situation above happens all the time, and is one that's difficult to explain to the road warrior in the heat of battle. My hope with this article though is to hopefully explain, in plain English, what's happening, and offer some work arounds.

What's Happening?
A number of ISP's have, in an attempt to curtail SPAM, prevented their clients from using third party mail servers to send mail (e.g., your mail server at work). The idea is that, by forcing you to use only their email servers, they can 'see' all of the email that's going out and can tell who is sending too much (what constitutes 'too much' is also something that's being hotly debated). This is only half of the picture though. Not only can you not use your corporate email server to send mail while on your ISP's network (you have to use the ISP's mail server), you can't use the ISP's mail server if you're *not* on their network. Basically, the changes that Bob (the 'Texan') had you make are only good while you're at home. As soon as you leave and log into a different network, your mail is broken again. While the intentions may (or may not) be noble by the ISP, the fact is that this solution doesn't really affect SPAM at all. The SPAMmer just works around it. The only person really affected by it is the customer.

Options
1) Setup multiple SMTP (outgoing) mail servers - Setup one SMTP server that works *outside* your ISP, and one that works *inside* your ISP. Typically, this will be something like mail.yourisp.com, but a pretty comprehensive list is available here.
2) Swit ch ISP's - This one is pretty simple, switch ISP's. A good place to start looking is DSL Reports. They feature an ISP search by Zip code, type, etc., and have reviews of the ISP's by folks that are actually using them.
3) Use webmail - If your company / corporate / organization provides webmail access (often something like http://webmail.yourcompany.com), use that while you're on your ISP's network.

Opinion
Though I can understand what the ISP's are *trying* to do, I have a hard time believing that the techies in charge of implementing these 'solutions' actually believe in what they're doing. If the outgoing mail port is blocked, SPAMers will simply u se an alternate port, leaving the legitimate users as the only ones affected by the blockage. The best solution would be a rework of the SMTP protocol altogether, but there are a number of interim solutions that are available *now* that could be put in place until SMTP was fixed.