Solution:
“Time out” errors usually are the fault of the email server, so there is nothing most users can do about it aside from calling their network administrator or ISP to make sure they are resolving the problem. Many times it is best to wait anywhere from several minutes to a few hours and try to send email again. Most email server problems are resolved quickly because they are usually software-related. Hardware-related problems that require hard drive swapping, cable replacement, or similar tasks take more time to resolve.
There is one other possibility regarding error messages related to sending email. If you have a hosted Web site or Web mail service and use its outgoing mail servers instead of the outgoing mail servers provided by your ISP, the ISP might purposely block the outgoing email. This has happened to us in the past, and the only way to resolve it was to configure Outlook 2003 to use our Web site’s server for incoming mail but route all outgoing mail through the ISP’s SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server.
Fortunately there is a way to do this without having to change the From line in your email messages. Expand the Tools menu, click Options, select the Mail Setup tab, and click E-mail Accounts. Select the View Or Change Existing E-Mail Accounts button, click Next, click the name of the account that is generating the error message, and click Change. When the E-mail Accounts dialog box appears, leave the information in the Incoming Mail Server field intact, but change the information in the Outgoing Mail Server field to match your ISP’s SMTP server (look at its Web site or call technical support to find out exactly what to enter here). In the E-Mail Address field, type the name that you want to have appear in the From line of your messages, click Next, and click Finish. Now Outlook will send email from your ISP’s server, but they will appear to come from your Web site’s server because of the From line. Unfortunately, outgoing messages will be subject to the restrictions imposed by the ISP, which generally caps maximum outgoing email sizes at 2MB to 3MB.
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