Hi, This has been very problematic through my firm, and although the only known fix is to restart and it works fine. But let me ask a few Q's Does your ISP require you to authenticate when you connect to their server?
Most times just authenticating when you connected to their network is
sufficient and you don't need to specify username and password to also
authenticate to their mail servers. Sometimes you do.
Are the mail servers on the same network as your ISP?
That is, are you
using their on-network servers or are you trying to use off-network servers?
Does Outlook Express work with the same mail servers?
Do you have anti-virus software that is scanning outbound (and maybe
inbound) e-mail? What happens if you disable it?
Do you use personal firewall software (or a cable/DSL modem that has a
firewall)? Can you connect if you disable it? Do you have inbound or
outbound ICMP traffic blocked?
Are you behind a firewall on a corporate network so you need to specify a
proxy to get out to the mail servers?
By the way, pinging a server only verifies that the host specified responds.
POP3 servers use port 110 and SMTP servers use port 25 but ping doesn't use
a port (it sits at the same level as IP and uses ICMP; see RFC 792 at
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc0792.html). So although you
can ping the server and get a response, that doesn't mean that particular
server has the POP3 and SMTP servers running on it.
If you can answer these, I can hunt the problem down pretty quick. Generally speaking, if you are running exchange, it seems to happen alot more often than just running outlook 2k on its own-
