When your email stops working, productivity can decrease drastically and even come to a halt. The best recommendation anyone can give in a case like this is to get in touch with your internal IT person/team. They know much more on not only how your computer functions in your office environment, but also if anything in the office environment is causing the issue.
However, you may not have an IT person on staff. In that case, here are a list of steps you can follow to try to troubleshoot the issue.
1. Restart your email program and/or computer
The cliche goes, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" There is some merit to this, as it does help fix minor issues. When a program/computer is on for long amounts of time (several days or weeks), programs will start to slow down and show errors. Most computers are not built to run constantly, and a lot of programs may have a bug that causes the program to crash after so much time.
2. Try sending email through the webmail portal.
Most (if not, all) email services provide a way to access your email through your Internet browser. This is commonly referred to as webmail, as it is usually accessed via a URL that looks like this: http://webmail.yourcompany.com. If you do not have info on how to access this, we recommend getting in touch with your email provider. If you are unsure of who your email provider is, we recommend talking to your internal IT person.
3. Check your email account settings.
Occasionally something is missing or incorrectly placed when a new email account is made, resulting in not only being unable to send emails but also being unable to even receive email messages. Your first course of action would be to check your account settings to make sure that it matches with your email providers account information. In some cases, certain items in the account settings cannot be edited once they are “activated”; should this occur, a new account profile with all the correct account information and settings must be made to replace the current email account. Once the new account is activated and is confirmed to be functional, set the new account as the primary account and delete the old account.
4. Contact your email provider.
Email providers will go through downtimes during server maintenance or other issues that causes service to go down temporarily for users. Most will even have a status page that a user can access to see if there are currently any issues (example from Rackspace: http://status.apps.rackspace.com/).
Even if the status page mentions that there are no issues, you will still want to get in touch with the email provider to see if the problem is isolated to your email account specifically.
5. Check with your Internet Service Provider.
Internet Service Providers (or ISPs) take steps to try and cut down on the amount of spam that gets sent throughout the world. Not all ISPs are alike in this, nor are certain ISP offerings. A basic internet package may have blocks in place for spam, while a higher-end or business package may have no blocks.
When contacting your ISP, you will want to ask if any of the following ports are restricted: 25, 465, 2525. When sending email from your computer, the most common port used is 25. However, if any of these ports are restricted, your ability to send email can be affected.
Hopefully those steps have helped you resolve your email sending issue. There are other steps that specific programs may need to try and troubleshoot this issue further. If you are still having issues, we recommend doing a search in Google, by putting in the name of the program you are using, and any error messages you are receiving. The problem you are having has most likely been solved by others.