I've been having problems with the outgoing mail using my umr account
I'm using Thunderbird and a IMAP connection, and that works fine. I can receive e-mails normal. and if I put my oen address as the recipient then there's no problem either, btu any outside e-mail and the server give me an error... for the life of me I can't figure this one out

Try opening a vpn connection, or using your isp's smtp server.

i get the same thing, thunderbird works for all incoming mail for an imap umr account, but only sends to @umr.edu addresses, if you try to send an email to @hotmail.com or @gmail.com, it says. 'relay for external or unregistered server denied'... i started using thunderbird and firefox almost 2 yrs ago... haven't figured out how to get thunderbird to send mail to anything other than the domain where your own address is. i've tried to use smtp-server.kc.rr.com (kc rr's smtp server) and same thing happens.

somebody tell me it's a stupid security or something related option i gotta change...

I've never had any problems sending out with thunderbird, on and off the network.

Weird. From where I'm sitting, I can't even connect to the smtp server. You guys are using smtp.umr.edu on port 25, right? No SSL/VPN or anything? For me the name resolves, but it won't respond to pings and port 25 is closed tight.

Let me expound upon LordoftheJujubes explaination a little more since you either didn't read it, or didn't understand. Your symptoms (and seek42 location) indicate you are checking your email off campus. UMR's outgoing (smtp) server is set up to only send mail to off-campus address if the connection is coming from on-campus. So:

oncampus -> anywhere : works fine
offcampus -> oncampus : works fine
offcampus -> offcampus : bad, blocked

Your solutions is to either set up the VPN so it looks like you're coming from oncampus, or use your current ISP's outgoing mail server.

ok, now I just have to set-up Thunderbird to dial the VPN connection every time it sends mail out... hmmm

Dang, looks like the UMR *nix servers aren't configured to allow SSH to use public key authentication. No one-click port forwarding for me :(

I don't know about all that one-click stuff, but I can do port forwarding on gpunix.umr.edu just fine.

If you're using windows, get putty...
Go to tunneling in the config
Set it up so that 25 local goes to smtp.umr.edu:25
and 110 local goes to minermail.umr.edu:110

then set up your email program to use localhost as server

If anybody wants more detailed info on how to do this, ask and I'll try to explain it better

Well yeah, that works just fine. But you have to type in your password and hit enter at the terminal type prompt. Not exactly conducive to scripting.

Ok well...you could run this

putty -L 25:smtp.umr.edu:25 -L 110:minermail.umr.edu:110 -l USERNAME -pw PASSWORD gpunix.umr.edu

You still have to hit enter at the terminal type to get a prompt...but you don't have to hit enter for port forwarding to work.

Your password would be plainly visible if you use normal startup methods (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run) ... Maybe you could execute it from within a program or something...

seems like a lot of work though...I'm content with pressing enter a couple times

Guess I need to read the docs a bit closer...wasn't aware that you could pass the password as a command-line argument. Thought you could only do your username that way. Thanks for the info!

While I was on campus I still had problems sending to off-campus email addresses. The stmp address was correct, I checked it many times. I was using outlook express, and it worked just fine, but then quit sending without errors. So I called IT, and they said to come by and pick up some other type of Outlook (I think it was a version of 2000). I didn't want to mess with that cause 2000 looks like crap. So I went straight to 2003, and it worked fine for about a week, and it started doing the same things. What am I doing wrong?

(I am willing to try something other than Outlook, so don't flame my non-existant loyalty to Microsoft)

use Exchange for Outlook...it's pretty slick. You still have to enter in your password every time, but just leave it running. you'll never have to hit send/recieve....you get email as soon as it hits your inbox. Also, if you don't know a guy's email address, just type in their last name and it should autoresolve. The thing can also tell you the person's complete list of email addresses, phone number, address, title...etc. Like I said, pretty slick.