Why can't I send mail from my hotel room?

if you are un able to email from your hotel then ask to the hotels administration why are asking to us you bloody fool

Interestingly, I have this issue quite often also. However...

I am working through a corporate VPN tunnel!!!

This issue is real for me and only on certain connections. I do not understand how it could happen within the vpn infrastructure though.

BTW - If the message I send is VERY small (i.e. only few bytes), it may well get sent successfully.

Any ideas?

Jules

Don't know if you know about this one. When I send or reply to email from AOL...it always fails

thanks for any help

As above...this is when I send from my hotmail account at home
thanks

Have met this issue with Egyptian and Middle East hotels. One concern is that under some countries' Company regulations there is a legal requirement for all business emails to be logged. Thus by diverting the email away from its intended path (and thus preventing its being logged at the site mailserver) whatever its intentions are, the hotel may be committing an offence, or causing an offence to be committed.

Leo, as always, you're a font of valuable knowledge. Thanks. I'd like to share one more tip that may help others stuck in this situation. I just found that those of us with Gmail accounts, if setup for pop access, can configure our mail clients to use gmail as our SMTP server. Sweet. Just need to configure the correct servername, port, and login info. Interested folks should check out the blog entry that clued me in, at http://www.geekzone.co.nz/tonyhughes/599. Or for more info, see my own blog entry: http://carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2007/3/23/get_around_blocked_smtp_email

Hope that helps someone.

What I did to solve this problem is sign up with http://smtp.com, which listens on other ports like 2525, and so keeps working in any hotel room. I haven't had any issues with outbound email since, but the only downside is that it costs about $4 per month.

I solved this problem by changing the email account settings in Outlook 2007. In the

Tools > Account Settings > Change > More settings > Outgoing Server

section just activate "Log on to incoming mail server before sending mail". I don't know if it will work for any email account, maybe it depends on the hotel, but it always works for my Hotmail and business accounts!
Hope this helps...

Matt's trick worked for me at one of the extended stay hotel, thanks matt
Puneet

I solved this problem by changing the email account settings in Outlook 2007. In the

Tools > Account Settings > Change > More settings > Outgoing Server

section just activate "Log on to incoming mail server before sending mail". I don't know if it will work for any email account, maybe it depends on the hotel, but it always works for my Hotmail and business accounts!
Hope this helps...

We use alternate port 26 and also select "logon to mail server before sending mail" and it works for one of our email servers but not the other! I think this may depend on the alternate port settings the email server is using. Why is it so hard to find a universal set of email settings that work everywhere? We have to coach our users to change these outlook settings depending on which office or hotel they are in. Some users are OK with it but others find it all too technical. As IT support, I find this issue very frustating. Outlook 2000 setting behave differently than 2007 settings too, just to add some extra challenge to this issue.
Bruce E