can't send out mail - "error 0x800ccc0e"

[Steve Last]

I thought this general explanation of what I have found about this problem with MS OUtlook and Outlook Express might be useful to anyone with several different email accounts (as I have).  I was plagued by this problem going back and forth to France and was going nuts with the incomprehensible explanations and solutions provided by various technical sites.  After having found a "local" solution thanks to BJSLIV and others on this forum, it still didn't stop us having problems elsewhere.  I hope this will help others in the same situation. What your own ISP will usually tell you (a) does not address your actual problem, for the reasons stated in para 4, and (b) is usually so techie-oriented as to be impossible for the average person with a real life away from the internet to understand !

In my case the problem is that my wife and I take our laptops to different countries, mainly England and France, but sometimes elsewhere. I have a BT account in England and a Free.Fr one in France, and use other people's systems from time to time. In SOME places everything works fine, but in SOME places everything appears normal while using the web or receiving mail, but then up comes this error when you try to SEND. It is particularly puzzling if, as I do, you have for example a separate business account and several personal accounts, and you find that the business one works fine but the personal ones sometimes don't. If this is what happens to you, read on.

The problem is basically caused by the ****s responsible for junk email. The Internet Service Provider you are actually using when the problem occurrs is (quite rightly) doing its best to prevent spam being passed through its system. It will not accept your outgoing emails because it does not recognise the email account you are sending from as genuinely entitled to send out mail through its system. It has been organised to pass on mail from "people it knows", principally those with an email account with that particular provider, and block everything else.

A lot of the technical advice you see about changing the settings etc. in Outlook and Outlook Express is based on the assumption that (1) the mail you want to send will have its address as yourname@supplier.com, AND (2) that you will be sending it through "supplier.com". For example, after all it's tech advice BT says "Please note - if you connect to the internet via another Internet Service Provider (ISP): For your non-BT email addresses, you won't be able to send mail using our mail server, (mail.btinternet.com), and for BT email addresses, you won't be able to use our mail server to send mail except with BT Yahoo! Premium Mail. Please refer to your ISP for further advice about sending mail,"   In other words, "it's your problem not ours".  

If you are using your own "home" ISP their advice will work, but If you aren't, e.g. away from home, your ISP's advice will probably not get you anywhere, depending on what "defences" the local ISP has set up.  If the connection you are using is for example "myforeignISP.com", you might find that just changing the outgoing mail server to smtp.myforeignISP.com will work. However it seems increasingly less likely that it will, as more ISPs protect themselves, and require outgoing mail to be "authenticated", i.e. to prove that it comes from someone "known" to it.

If the connection you are actually using is one that you actually set up and pay for, e.g. www.myforeignISP.com, you should have received an email address and a password from them such as [email protected], even if you never actually use it. You should then be able to use that username and password in the account's outgoing mail server authentication settings.

If you don't "own" an account with the "away" supplier, then you appear to have only 2 other options. The simplest is to forget about using Outlook Express or Outlook at all until you can get back onto your own supplier. However this can be a real pain if you use it for business or have lots of messages etc to organise.

The other appears to be to use a relay service of some kind. These are connections already recognised by other ISPs, so they can pass mail through them. Essentially, the outgoing mail is diverted via the web to the relay company BEFORE it gets to the ISP's mail system, and is sent on by the relay service instead. If some of your email comes through your own business or employer's systems, that is a form of relay. That is why you sometimes find that your business mail account will send OK but your personal ones won't - the business ones are relayed but the personal ones are blocked because they aren't going through the business address. The other type of relay service such as www.Net2Roam.com is intended for frequent travellers, . These provide local internet access in a huge range of places. You usually have to pay for time when using one of their links but costs are not excessive for email as your online time is usually very short. With Net2roam there's no registration fee but you have to purchase some units to be used whenever you need connect via their network. They give you a username and password for THEIR outgoing mail server, which is used instead of the ISP's own. It appears to be transparent to most "home" suppliers so you don't need to change it back, and aren't paying for it, when you are at home.

Steve