Outlook 2003 dials wrong connection - settings don't stick

[Olivier Saurin]

I am helping a friend. She uses Outlook 2003 on XP SP2.

Up to yesterday she had one ISP with an
email account at that ISP. The ISP name is Freeserve.

She wanted another email address for work and decided to sign up with
another ISP, Tiscali, to get a new email.

She uses pay as you go dialup with both Freeserve and Tiscali.

The new Tiscali connection is the default connection for IE and shows as the
default connection in Connect To|Show All Connections.

Indeed if not connected, going to IE and requesting an online page brings
the dial-up connection dialog for Tiscali.

With Outlook 2003 however, clicking on Send/Receive brings the dial-up
connection for Freeserve.

I tried changing the settings for each account in the Groups setting.
Selecting the email account and Edit there is then a Connection tab in which
there are 2 choice for dialling (one if the LAN connection is not available
if I remember well) and one that says connect using IE or 3rd party dialler.

If I change to use the phone in each account and specify to use the Tiscali
connection, clicking Send/Receive results in the Tiscali dial-up connection
dialog so it seems to work. However if I exit Outlook 2003 and restart it it
doesn't work anymore. The settings are changed back to using IE or 3rd party
dialler.

If I delete the Freeserve connection then it works, but the Freeserve
connection is needed from time to time, at the minimum to keep the email
account alive.

I realise that the '3rd party dialler may be significant. How would I find
out if there is a 3rd party dialler? Or is that a red herring?

Thank you very much in advance

Olivier

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

Well, did she have to install any software to use FreeServe? BTW, there are
easier ways to get more than one email account other than signing up with
another ISP. It seems like a lot of work/money just to have another address

 

[Olivier Saurin]

Vince,

Thank you for your interest.

She installed Freeserve from a CDROM, I think. Freeserve does a little bit
of branding ('Internet Explorer brought to you by Freeserve') but doesn't
seem to install anything else than the straightforward dialup connection
and
probably the email account.

There was a 'Tiscali Setup' shortcut already on the desktop. We clicked
that, it dialled the sign-up server, we chose a name and gave details.
Tiscali created the dialup networking connection (and, predictably, set it
as the default) and the email account (and in the process made OE the
default for email apparently, since we had the message Outlook 2003 was
not
the default email program when we started it. It also added a kind of
control panel called Tiscali 10.0 from where you can connect, disconnect,
view your account details, etc...

Are you alluding at free email addresses like Yahoo, Hotmail or GMail?
Hotmail doesn't allow new accounts to be seen in Outlook and anyway is not
appropriate with sporadic dialup connections (people with dialup tend to
disconnect as soon as possible. If they don't they end up paying more on
telephone than if they were on broadband and do the switch). I don't know
about GMail which I haven't tried. I know I had to subscribe to a few
things
before Yahoo would let me collect the email from their POP server and send
some through their SMTP. I wasn't sure it was still possible to do it; I
didn't manage to get POP/SMTP to work with the last Yahoo account I
created.
Anyway, she preferred to get a Tiscali account. After all it doesn't look
like a free account, which is a benefit in her case.

Here in the UK we can sign up for dialup with ISP who offer a
pay-as-you-go
service. Nothing to pay up-front. You register then you dial a so-called
'Lo-Call' number which is charged to you at the local tariff (we do pay
for
local calls here). The ISP gets a portion of that from the telephone
operator. Cost of signing up with Tiscali: none (except the call to the
sign-up server). Time taken to sign up to Tiscali? No more and maybe less
than signing up for a Yahoo email account. And she gets an email account
that could well be from a broadband account, for all we know, instead of
an
obviously free account.

Usually ISPs like you to be dialled up to them before you can use their
SMTP
as they don't want to relay from persons unknown. She wants to use her
Tiscali account for work (freelance) and continue using the Freeserve
account for family. I believe that I can go around the relaying problem by
specifying credentials for the SMTP account so that she could send private
mail from her Freeserve account while dialled up to Tiscali. I could then
remove the Freeserve dial-up connection from that computer and Outlook
would
have no way to call it.

The only problem is that you need to use Freeserve from time to time or
you
end-up losing your account. This would actually be dealt with on the
children's computer, which is set to dial Freeserve on that account (not
networked, no ICS - partly to limit the time the kids spend online to a
minimum).

So I think I have a workaround, but I'd quite like to know why these
settings didn't stick because I've lost some credibility as a computer man
in the process .

(Should I apologize for the long post or are detailed explanations
welcome?)

Thanks in advance

Olivier