Email stopped working

Larrycleve · #1 September 26th, 2009, 01:27 AM

I'm helping my mother who has an old mac laptop. I'm not familiar with macs so please bear with me. Her email has stopped working. She's using OS 10.3.9. It's apple's email app. I notice that when trying to send it sometimes says that it timed out on port 25. She seems to receive items but can't send. She's sent things to me which haven't gotten through. She used to have a percentage bar and a sound when mail was sent which has stopped. She has full bars for her wireless connection and safari browses the internet fine. What should I be looking for?

ngcomputing · #2 September 26th, 2009, 04:20 AM

Your ISP may be blocking outgoing mail, aka mail relaying, if she is using an email account other than what was provided by her ISP. What can be strange about this, I have a client that had the same issue with Embarq, port 25 would work intermittently, then quit. So, I changed him over to port 26 and that resolved the issue.

If she is using an email account other than the one provided by the ISP try going into the account settings and changing the port to 26 and make sure any SSL or secure connections are disabled.

Larrycleve · #3 September 26th, 2009, 12:25 PM

She's using the .mac email. Where do I find account settings to make this change. Also it sometimes says it can't find the server smtp.mac .

Satcomer · #4 September 26th, 2009, 12:52 PM

Open Mail and in the menu item "Mail" click on it and open 'Preferences'. In the popup highlight the "Accounts" tab and highlight your Mom's email account. In the side window find the SMTP port setting and change the SMTP port to 587 and in the password section make sure the Mac member name & password is filled out.

Plus in Mail you can go to the menu item "Window" and in the drop down is "Connection Doctor". You can use that to pinpoint the part were the fault is in speaking to the email servers.

Larrycleve · #5 September 26th, 2009, 02:54 PM

It's getting better. I received a test message from her computer. However, after a message is sent an error message appears "delivery failed due to illegal address Larry" . There's an address named "Larry Mark" that contains my correct email address, but nothing named just "Larry". I've tried deleting and recreating my address several times but there's still the error. If an address is just typed in bypassing the address book the error appears right away and nothing is sent.