Originally Posted by msb0b

I think it is an ISP problem. Increasingly more ISPs are filtering outgoing email traffic on SMTP as to prevent spam from entering the email system. They have to do this because their subscribers' zombie computers are sending spam using the standard SMTP protocol. UAallthway's ISP may have just implemented this policy. Unfortunately, his legitimate outgoing mail became victims of this change.

The symptoms are as follows: 1. The mail program tries to contact the mail server to send email. 2. ISP catches the outgoing mail and sends it to a blackhole. 3. The server never receives the request therefore does not respond. 4. The mail program does not receive a success or fail response from the server and reports "time out" error.

If this is indeed the situation. There are several ways to fix this.

1. Use the ISP's SMTP server. This requires changing one setting, but you will need to change it every time when you arrive at a new location. Additionally, mail sent this way may be mis-identified as spam as your email address does not match with the ISP's SMTP server domain name.

2. Use SMTP over SSL, which uses a different port number from plain SMTP so the ISP will not filter this traffic. You will need to contact your web host on whether this service is available and how to configure the email program.

3. Create a VPN tunnel between the computer and mail server. VPN is not likely to be available with web hosts. More often, VPN is used for remote access to a corporate network.