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Now, choose Window > Connection Doctor, and wait for it to complete its checks. Next to the
SMTP server you just modified, if you see a green dot (on the left) and the text (on the right)
“Connection and login to server succeeded,” all is well. If not, contact your email provider for
assistance.
If no alternative port solves the problem, you have three options:
• Use your email provider's webmail interface to send mail until you return to your
regular network.
• Send your message from a different account in Mail, if one is available that
doesn't suffer from the port-blocking problem.
• Use a virtual private network—such as those provided at modest cost by
PublicVPN or WiTopia , or the free Hotspot Shield service.
A VPN makes it appear to remote servers as though your Mac is on a different
network, not the one you're actually connected to, and in most cases the VPN
won't block port 25. Once you connect your Mac to the Internet using one of
these services, you should be able to send email on whichever port you normally
use.
Fix Sending Delays
Error messages aren't the only problems that can arise when sending mail. Sometimes
Mail succeeds in sending your messages, but only after what seems like an interminable
delay—perhaps 30 seconds or longer for each outgoing message. One likely cause of this
problem is that OS X is taking too long to do a DNS lookup. This problem, in turn, often oc-
curs when your ISP doesn't provide any explicit addresses for its DNS servers, but rather sup-
plies them dynamically using DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol), the same meth-
od by which your computer probably gets its IP address. The upshot is that when Mail tries
to send, it might have to query several servers in a row (waiting for each to respond) to figure
out how to talk to the SMTP server.
The best way to solve this problem is to stop relying on your ISP to dynamically supply the
addresses of its (possibly slow) DNS servers. Using a free service called OpenDNS, you can
override your default (dynamic or blank) DNS server list with the static addresses of speedy,
reliable DNS servers.
To use OpenDNS, follow these steps:
1. Go to System Preferences > Network.
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