Ben

Many isps block port 25 because it is used by spammers who load trojan horses / botnets on computers. Port 25 is the basic port for sending mail. There is also an almost ubiquitous port 465 for sending secure mail. Why isps don’t block this port is a mystery because a spammer could just as easily use it. Anyway to make your computer send mail fine when port 25 is blocked, the easiest thing to do is change outlook to use SSL and port 465 instead of 25.

Change from this:

Outlook Standard Config

To this:

Outlook SSL Configuration

Notice that I also switched to the Secure POP3 port of 995.

It might ask you about a ssl certificate just click okay (how bad could it be you weren’t even using secure mail before).

I really think this is a bad practice by ISPs, but I’m not calling the shots.

This post is more like notes for myself.

In my opinion outlook can be a huge pain to work with, but its such an essential tool to get going well.

First of all I like to keep almost all of the data I would actually need to backup in “My Documents”. On my home pc I actually move the my documents folder to another drive.

I’m going to start storing my outlook files in My Documents/My Outlook Data. To do this first I move the data files. It’s probably better to compact them first and all remember to kill all outlook.exe processes you might have running. One cool thing is you can access the datafile settings from control panel -> mail

eventually leads to

For some reason though, this method does not move old mail items. I find that very weird. I would think it should re-download old mail items.

I find when you have multiple Data files like this it is best to put each inbox in the favorite folders list. Also I think i’ll find that separating these data files into separate files will improve performance and avoid having huge 2gb data files like i currently have.