Updated February 13, 2012
Can’t send email anymore? Here’s the ultimate solution:
What to do if you can receive but can’t send email on a new account
If you are setting up a new account and you can receive email fine but you can’t send email at all, there are a few things to look at. The possibilities are:
- The account didn’t get set up exactly according to the instructions.
- The account is set up exactly according to the instructions but the instructions are wrong!
The instructions for setting up an email account to work with Outlook 2010 usually aren’t hard. Still, there are typically a lot of steps, and if you don’t get everything exactly right, bad stuff happens like you can’t send email. That probably doesn’t surprise you. But I bet the second possibility does.
I know I was surprised when I started running into instructions for setting up accounts that are just plain incorrect. The problem seems to be that email providers sometimes change the settings needed to connect with a program like Outlook, but don’t go back to correct all the old copies of the instructions that are floating around the Internet.
When I first started gathering and publishing instructions for connecting Outlook 2010 to various email services, I had exactly this problem. I kept running into the, “I can receive but I can’t send email” problem myself. Due to the ever-growing problems of spam, malware, and other malicious uses of email, companies have beefed up the security of their networks. That’s great, but the changes they have to make to do this sometimes don’t get incorporated into the publicly available instructions for setting up a connection. Or perhaps more accurately, they don’t make it into every copy of the instructions floating around out there.
As a result, if you have just set up an email account, and you can receive, but can’t send email, the chances are good that the instructions you followed are bad. So what do you do?
First, I suggest you walk through the instructions again, just to be sure that all your settings exactly match those in the instructions. We’ve got to eliminate the possibility of a simple typo before anything else.
Assuming all the settings are correct and you still can’t send email, you need to answer this question, “Where did you get those instructions?”
Did you get them off this Living-With-Outlook-2010 website? If so, please leave me a comment below. I need to know if there’s a problem with any of the instructions on this site. I’ll dig into it and see what we can do to get your connection working properly.
If you didn’t get the instructions from this Living-With-Outlook-2010 website, I urge you to click this link and see if I have posted instructions for the kind of email account you are working with. If so, you should try following my instructions and see if that fixes the problem.
In many cases, the instructions you find here are more current than those elsewhere online (sometimes even than those posted on the email provider’s website) and by following them you can fix the problem. Not only is providing accurate Outlook 2010 instructions the heart of my business, but with so many visitors using the instructions posted here every day, if there’s something wrong with instructions I post, I hear about it quickly.
I tried all this but I still can’t send email!
Hopefully you will never get to this section, because it means none of the advice above helped. But if you do get here, there’s one last thing you can try. If you can’t send mail using my instructions or the ones you find on the email provider’s site, you can try using someone else’s SMTP server.
Most email services send their messages through their own SMTP servers. So if you can’t send email through their servers, you can try sending it through someone else’s SMTP servers.
But the same problems that have caused email providers to clamp down on security have reduced the number of available SMTP servers that aren’t part of someone’s email service. One solid company that’s still providing an independent SMTP service is SMTP2Go. They provide a very affordable service, and even ofter a free trial, so you can see if their solution will work for you before making any commitments. Check them out by clicking the image below.
SMTP2Go provides an SMTP server that was specifically designed to work from any location in the world. It comes highly recommended as it eliminates the “can’t send email problem” and it really does work! Click here to visit the site.
From here you can:
Return to the main Can’t Send Email page
Find More Info…
Related posts:
Julie,
A fellow user went through the whole process of getting this activated. Here’s what he learned:
- – - – - – - – - – -
This condition occurs when a customer sets up his own master email address in Yahoo before his service is connected. (That is what I did.) When service is finally activated, this address is recognized as one outside their system and will not see it as valid. An ATT agent must create your master address so it can be validated inside their system and therefore viewed as a valid email address!
This nightmare took me 4 days to resolve and I had to figure it out as the level 3 techs in India that I had to deal with were pretty useless.
- – - – - – - – - – -
Hopefully this information will help you get connected.
Thanks for sharing this information Joe!
Julie,
I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help. Please let us know what the support guys have to say.
–Bill
Bill,
I looked at all of those suggestions earlier and they did not help. It looks as though I may have to resort to paying the $15 to get the problem resolved. In the scheme of things it may be a lot cheaper than me spending more of my time trying to figure this out on my own. Thanks anyway.
Julie
Julie,
One more possibility. There are several things that can cause you to be able to receive mail but not send it. Try going to this Can’t Send Mail page and see if any of the suggestions there help.
–Bill
Bill,
Thanks for your quick response and offer to help. Sorry to say, but I just tried your new server options and I am getting the exact same message. It logs onto incoming mail server, but cannot send the test email message. Any other suggestions for the options?
Thanks,
Julie
Julie,
From reviewing posts online, you are not the only person being told to pay for support when making this connection, even though the information is still available for free on their site.
I’m looking at their latest help pages, and they are saying to use a different set of servers. In my instructions, try replacing pop.att.yahoo.com with inbound.att.net and smtp.att.yahoo.com with outbound.att.net and see if they let you connect then.
Please let me know if this works for you so I can update the page and save others some of the hassles you are going through.
Thanks,
–Bill
Trying to connect Outlook 2010 with my ATT Uverse / Yahoo email address. Tried all of your settings. The Log onto incoming mail server is Completed, but get an error on the test email saying the connection to the server was interrupted. ATT is no help but to tell me to subscribe to their ConnectTech service for $15. Any suggestions?
Martyn,
Thanks for the update. Is anyone else seeing similar problems with this?
–Bill
Got the POP3/SMTP, Ports info, etc, from Cox website. Tried your instruction to set up Outlook 2010. However, still could not send emails and I could only receieve. Finally, just chose the email radio button from the add account pop-up, left the server settings alone, and let Outlook sort it out. Can now receive/send emails. Outlook has following settings for my Cox accounts.
POP3 incoming: pop.cox.net (note no “east” as shown on Cox website)
SMTP: smtp.cox.net (again no “east”)
Incoming POP3 port : 995
Requires SSL
outgoing SMTP port: 587
Encrypted connection: TLS
My Oulook 2010 works fine with these settings.