I can receive email but I can't send!

  • Thread starter Thread starter tman72
  • Start date Start date
I just did an experiment that sheds a little more light on this.

My wife has her own separate user acct on the same computer. She also has
her own email acct, also on AT&T(Yahoo/SBC), a sub-email-account under my
master account. She can send email just fine, although she also saw this
same error sporadically just after I had changed the password. But now, she
can send email with no errors.

So, I created a second email account in Windows Mail using her email acct
info. This account behaves the SAME WAY. If I create an email with her
account as the sender, and then attempt to send it with her account, it gives
the same error message about server termination.

Something has become corrupted or otherwise messed up in my user account.
 
I fixed it! I was poking around looking at Windows Mail settings, and under
Tools, Options, Security, Digital IDs, I saw that there were three
certificates issued to my computer's name. I wasn't sure what the meaning of
this is (who issued the certificates and why?), but I took a chance and
deleted them. Now, I can send email! I suppose that somehow one of those
certificates must have been involved in the SSL port 465 transaction. But why
does it work now, with NO certificates. I went back and looked, thinking that
maybe Windows auto-generated a new certificate, but it did not. There is only
one certificate remaining, one I made myself long ago when playing around
with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). Maybe it used that one?

Microsoft must have some kind of problem with certificates and SSL and
perhaps related to changing of passwords on email accounts.
 
By "this did not help" you mean that installing Windows Live Mail did
not make any difference?

Are you running any third party security programs like SpyBot?
If not, you may want to uninstall OneCare, just to see if it is the culprit.
 
If this is a continuation of a previous post, you should not be posting with
a new Subject title. Always respond to the last message in the existing thread,
otherwise we have no way of keeping all your information together.
 
Did you ever have an antivirus program installed on that PC?
Most new PCs come with a trial version of McAfee or Norton antivirus.
 
Did you ever have an antivirus program installed on that PC?
Most new PCs come with a trial version of McAfee or Norton antivirus.
Click to expand...

No, never.
Ted
 
Ted - I have the same problem that you had. I have Windows Vista. After you
hit Digital Id's it looks like there are several tabs for the certificates,
the first being "personal" then "other people", and others. Which one did you
clear out?
 
No. A partnered account (AT&T with Yahoo) uses different servers
than a non-partnered Yahoo account.
 
Well, you've got me stumped.
I have never heard of Windows Defender or Windows Firewall interfering
with Windows Mail. Yet the symptoms point to some security program
stopping the SMTP transaction. Have you thought about doing a System
Restore to a date prior to the start of this problem?
The only other solution is a repair-install of Vista. I've never done one,
but folks who have used this procedure say it retains all data:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88236-repair-install-vista.html
 
I cleared out the "Personal" ID's.

I'm still wondering if this was really what fixed it, but it must have been.
It was solidly broken until the moment I deleted those things, then it
worked.
 
Gary: Because I posted additional info under a different subject, you may
have missed this:

I fixed it! I was poking around looking at Windows Mail settings, and under
Tools, Options, Security, Digital IDs, Personal, I saw that there were three
certificates issued to my computer's name. I wasn't sure what the meaning of
this is (who issued the certificates and why?), but I took a chance and
deleted them. Now, I can send email! I suppose that somehow one of those
certificates must have been involved in the SSL port 465 transaction. But why
does it work now, with NO certificates? I went back and looked, thinking
that
maybe Windows auto-generated a new certificate, but it did not.

Microsoft must have some kind of problem with certificates and SSL and
perhaps related to changing of passwords on email accounts.
 
Interesting. Very few users who post here (myself included) use Digital IDs.
So, there is little expertise here in how to use or fix those things.
 
I did see your other post. Port 465/SSL works without any certificates.
I have no clue as to how Digital ID certificates would interfere with that.
 

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