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Uhg. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not, but I’ve been having some serious email issues lately.

Basically I could only send email if it was very very very small in size. Too much text (or God forbid an attachment) and it wouldn’t send. Instead I’d get an error message that the email server could not be found.

Well it found it just fine for small emails … it was the large ones that would hang. Because I love all of you and scan my email messages for viruses before they are sent out it would usually (read always) get hung while scanning those large emails for viruses.

In desperation I turned off outbound email scanning (screw all of you). Still my Anti-Virus (AV) program INSISTED on being a proxy for outbound email even though it wasn’t supposed to be doing anything at all. And still the email would hang and my AV program would toss up an error saying the server could not be found.

In desperation I UNINSTALLED the AV program (and the firewall, etc that was of the same brand).

Suddenly a particular email that was stuck in my outbox for about 2 months went through just fine.

Ah ha! I thought. I knew it was that damned AV program.

I sent scolding notes to the AV maker and started looking through my collection of vendor business cards for a name of someone in product development for the company (working in security you get these sorts of things). I didn’t find a name, so I put Todd on the war path on my behalf.

Last night I uninstalled everything made by that company and installed a competitors suite. I fired up the email client and sent off a large attachment to test …. it failed.

I nearly wept.

I called my ISP for help. (I hate doing this) I had been to their website and they mention this brand of software and this error and had some fixes (all of which I had tried about a million times already).

When Earthlink answered the phone I was ready for a battle and started off explaining that I was a network security professional, that I understood the internet, AV, and he needn’t dumb things down for me … I wasn’t in the mood.

He had me read off my email settings (to his credit, he believed me when I told him I’d tried everything he was supposed to have me try first).

As it turns out …

My ISP had changed the server name and port I was supposed to be using for outbound email. How I was to know this I don’t know, but the bottom line is … while it wasn’t really MY fault, it certainly wasn’t the fault of the AV maker, or my poor computer … both of which endured some serious scolding.

Anyway … I think I can send email again. However this morning I managed to totally screw up my inbound email server settings … so I’m not sure I can receive it now.