Cannot Send Mail from Hotels, Airports, etc

It sounds like you actually have to be connected to the BellSouth network in order to send mail. Since the airport or hotel aren't part of the BellSouth network, it's blocking the send request.

This is a security measure implemented by BellSouth to prevent spammers from sending emails through their network without be authenticated.

It's probably best to use the web client to send your messages. Or you could contact the BellSouth tech support to get their recommendations.

Good luck!

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Bronson

This is not a BellSouth problem but a problem with the ISP used for connecting to the internet when not BellSouth.

If you routinely stay at the same hotel chain in different cities, the ISP the hotel chain uses should be the same at each hotel.

Check with the hotel front desk with checking in or the hotel staff may direct you to their ISP for the required settings for using an SMTP server that is outside of their network.

I don't travel as much as I once did but I haven't experienced any problems sending mail with any of my email accounts when using an available wireless network at an Airport - especially if the wireless network requires payment for access.

Some free and paid wireless access locations do not support an authenticated SMTP server so if BellSouth's SMTP server is authenticated, turning off authentication of the SMTP server may resolve it and turning it back on when returning home may be all that is required.

I've had a similar issue on our server. We have a variety of travelling employees, mostly running 10.4.x and using Mail as their email client. Our 10.4.x mailserver is set to require SMTP authentication (PLAIN and Login). Outbound SMTP from these mobile laptops works quite normally about 90% of the time but we do find hotel/airport networks that sometimes prevent us from sending mail (usually with the error message that "smtp.xxxxxxxxxxxx.com has rejected your password while trying to authenticate" or something similar. You mentioned how some networks do not allow SMTP Authentication traffic. Can you elaborate on this at all and any solutions for temporary fixes?

Since we require SMTP Authentication on our server (to prevent SPAM relay), we can't turn off SMTP Authentication on the client's Mail.app. I keep a list of known open relays that we can temporarily use in these situations, but I would rather set up our server and client properly to avoid these issues.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Cheers,
Brett

Yes sometimes outgoing TCP connections on port 25 (SMTP) are blocked or more usually redirected to a specific server which won't accept your own login details naturally.

One solution is to use an alternate port for outoing authenticated SMTP, e.g. 587 or 2525. If you manage your own SMTP server then you should be able to configure this on the server and on all the clients.

good luck

iMac DV 450MHz, 640MB, 20GB HD, Airport Xtreme Mac OS X (10.3)