I'm having trouble sending email via SMTP on my account...

A number of ISPs (MSN, Earthlink, AOL, and others) have recently been blocking or redirecting TCP port 25 from within their network. In these instances, when you try to send mail via your hosting account, your connections to mail.[yourdomain].com are either being blocked, or redirected to your ISP's mail server.

The practice of blocking outbound port 25 is an attempt by ISPs to keep spammers from signing up for their ISP service, and then using their access to send out spam emails via open third party mail relays.

If you are using an ISP service that blocks/redirects port 25 in this fashion, you will need to change your outbound mail server setup in your mail client to connect via port 26 instead of port 25. We have setup our servers to accept inbound SMTP mail on port 26 as well as the standard port 25.