Discrepancies in Online Status in Mail

Question

I’m having problems sending emails, similar to those reported here and elsewhere in these discussions. I have some slightly different observations that might shed some light.
1. I have no trouble receiving emails.
2. I do have trouble sending emails, but only with 2 of my five email accounts. All five accounts are with the same web host; bluehost, and all five are with the same domain name.
3. It seems that over the past month I have had consistent trouble with ONLY two of the accounts and as of yesterday, one of those two is now working, trouble free, but I don't know what I might have changed. So, I’m down to one problem account. (Lucky me!)
4. In my efforts to diagnose and correct this, I did notice one curious thing that I haven’t seen stated on this thread. Here’s a description:
If (while I’m in the Mail program) I go to the Mailbox Menu and check the Online Status of all 5 accounts, it appears that they are all “online.” It doesn’t actually SAY that my accounts are online but, rather, the only available option is to take each account “Offline.”
So, Mailbox menu > Online Status >
The choices shown are:
Take “Account 1” Offline
Take “Account 2” Offline
Take “Account 3” Offline
Take “Account 4” Offline
Take “Account 5” Offline
That seems to be a backward way of say that these accounts are all online.
Now, however, if I go to the “Preferences . . .” in Mail and select “Accounts” > “Account Information” > Outgoing Mail Sever (SMTP) there is a drop-down menu that show all 5 of my accounts BUT after one of the accounts I see “Offline” in parentheses:
So, the third one of my 5 accounts show as . . .
Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP): box555.bluehost.com:[email protected] (Offline)
Of course, I’m using bogus place holders here for the Box###, AccountName and DomainName to hide the actual account information, but I hope this is clear enough.
Bottom line: in Mail’s Mailbox menu it indicates that this account is Online; in preferences in indicates it is Offline.
Can anyone see what might be wrong here? I’ve been really, REALLY careful in setting up my accounts and rechecking everything, and I can’t find any obvious errors that I’ve made.
I suspect this is a bug in the Apple Mail program, but I have not had this problem prior to OS X 10.6.2.
Oh, by the way . . . the problem, then, is that I can’t send mail from that one account. The mail program appears to TRY to send the message when I hit Send with the pinwheel spinning. But eventually I get a Mail dialog box saying:
“Cannot send message using the server box555.bluehost.com:[email protected]”
“Connection on the default ports failed." And it offers me the full SMPT Server List so that I can choose a different server of edit the server list.
Sorry for such a tedious description, but this problem is driving me crazy and it appears that I’m not the only one with this problem.

Answer 1

Good suggestion and I will contact Bluehost tomorrow. However, I been with them for over a year with not problems. The problem started (for me) with OS 4.6. and and/or Mail v4.2.
Will report back if I learn anything useful.
Dennis