How can I get outgoing mail in Mail program to work consistently?

Question

Some times using Mail messages can be sent immediately on any of my several accounts including a gmail account. Other times no mail can be sent perhaps until the next day. It just read sending. If I transfer my outgoing gmail messages to gmail on safari I can send it immediately. I am changing no settings and incoming mail is coming in without difficulty. This is most frustrating if I am trying to response to a message and I can't get it out until the next day. Any suggestions? Thank you

Answer 1

I have had sbcglobal dsl and now Uverse and periodically have had the problem of outgoing mail being rejected by the smtp server. The problem has been changes made at the server by the isp. I make no changes and things go from working to not working. Over the last 6 years I have gotten pretty good and "fixing" the problem by deleting accounts and reentering the data in the Mail program and at the AT&T website. A process they call verification is involved. Now it is broken and it is unfixable.
I have spent the better part of the last 3 days trying to get a third party or vanity email address to verify. The panels say I have successfully verified my address but it will not send. Along the way I have read a lot of stuff on various forums and am thinking that the issue may be the same between at&t and other big providers... they shut down 3rd party address on smtp in their war on spam.
So we called att support and were told we would have to pay for premium support. We asked instead to cancel our service. We signed up with a local dsl service (Houston) and discovered to our dismay that DSL does not equal DSL. The local service has never been able to swap over a Uverse dsl service. So we were back to Uverse to have Uverse dsl canceled and regular at&t dsl installed.... it is like dealing with two different companies. Along the way we discover that at our location we will lose the 6 Mbps service and only be able to get 1.5 Mbps... our modem will have to be changed out and at this point we are sad and weakened. The Uverse rep offers to lower the premium support charge from $30 to $15 so we gave in and signed up for it. The next day I get the very polite and seemingly competent Paulo on the line. We get set up for him to take over the cursor and we start reviewing my settings. Bottomline. I had all my settings perfect... practice, practice etc. They were absolutely correct on every panel. Paulo got to see that the verification does not work and that it is not possible to set up a "reply to" third party address that will work. Paulo was very nice and very baffled. He invited me to call back but he really had no idea about what to do to get things working.
By this time I am feeling pretty defeated and trapped... I cannot reasonably move to another provider and no one at AT&T can make it work. There is a happy ending for me in this though and this could work for someone else which is why I am making this long post. My vanity email is from an email forwarding service where I have had an account for 12 years. My isps change as my job has moved me overseas and back and across the US several times... my email address does not change. The company I use is pobox.com I was looking around at their website and noticed that my service includes use of their smtp server. I printed off the instructions, which they have for about 20 mail clients, pc, mac, et al and within 10 minutes I was sending mail from [email protected]. I got no error messages and when the mail arrived it showed from [email protected] and when we replied to that email it put [email protected] in the to:. Man am I happy! This fix did not cost me incremental $ and it was easy. The service costs $20 per year for a single year subscription... I have a 5 yr which runs me $15 per year. There are other benefits to the service... decent spam filtering and url forwarding.
If you are having a problem with a vanity address not working through your isp smtp server and you can stomach $20 per year, go on over to pobox.com and tell them Pam sent you.
ps the other thing that I got to work was sending mail out from my mobileme account using their smtp server. Mobileme will not allow me to use my vanity address but I am happier having .mac in my return address than att or sbcglobal.