No, not viruses. I mean, what do you do when the software you depend on stops working? For example, today Outlook 2003 just refused to send mail to our SMTP mail server. It would say “timeout, server not responding” or some such. Oh, and there was a nasty Hex number associated with the message that you’d think would help when you google it, but no. No good advice from the Goog. Instead, just stupid stuff I’d already tried, like “change the ports” or “delete the account configuration and re-enter the authentication details”, and the old chestnut, “reboot your computer and see if the problem goes away”.

I even got onto a web chat session with my ISP support dude, who said *he* had no problem sending and receiving email from that account.

Only one thing worked. I set up my email account in Mozilla Thunderbird. It send test messages flawlessly. Then I went back to Outlook. Still no joy sending outgoing mail. That’s when I said it, “OK. I guess I’m switching to Thunderbird for my email from now on, then *sigh*.”

Next time I pushed send/receive in Outlook, it worked.