OK,

2003 Dell 8100 with WinXP and WordPerfect Office.

At the moment, I am using the MS Outlook as my email program and am routing two online email accounts into Outlook - one is Hotmail, the other is my University email. Now, onto the problem:

I can recieve and read emails fine through Outlook, but when I try to send them, McAfee's virus scan stops it with a "protocol error" and when I open the link to get more info about the problem, it says:

Command sent was: RCPT TO: <email address I was sending to>

Response recieved is: 550 5.7.1 Relaying not allowed: email address

Consult the online help for your e-mail program for more information on this error. Contact your e-mail provider if the problem persists.

I can send emails from the websites OK, and I've tried more than one email address, so it's not the server on the other end kicking it back...any ideas on this one?

well, I got that fixed by disabling virus scan on the emails...but, now Outlook won't let it through, saying it was rejected by the recievers:

The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'cindym@culver.org'. Subject '', Account: 'bluemail.butler.edu', Server: 'bluemail.butler.edu', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '550 5.7.1 Relaying not allowed: cindym@culver.org', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 550, Error Number: 0x800CCC79


WTF?

If you are not on campus right now, you are probably not allowed to send mail through your campus mailserver without authenticating somehow. You can find out more info on authenticating and how your campus mailserver requires you to do it by contacting your IT staff on campus.

If you are currently on campus, you will need to check your "FROM" email address. Chances are if you want to send mail through Butler's mailserver, you need to have your "From" email setup as "yourusername@butler.edu" in order to send to anyone through them.

Did this problem just start occuring recently? Was it working previously? If so, can you fill me in on what changed?

Well, it was working fine in May when I had the computer online last - but it was hooked into the university network. This summer, I could access, recieve and send emails online on other computers. Now, I have moved to an apt. off campus and the computer from last year has just started doing this. I can still recieve emails, and I can still send them from the online server - just not through o utlook...

Ok, there is your problem. As with most ISP's, you are not allowed to send outgoing mail through their server unless you are their customer (e.g. you are on their network).

Contact Butler's IT/network support department and ask them how you can send and receive emails now that you are off-campus.

They may tell you to reconfigure your 'bluemail.butler.edu' account to send mail through the current ISP of your off-campus internet connection. They may also just have you choose authentication of some sort - but the whole problem here is that you are off-campus and trying to send email from some other network that is not on the campus network.

Think about it like this: If your university just let any old Joe Schmoe send email through their mailserver, spammers would be using their mailserver all day long to proliferate their crap email to everyone in the world. This "only send through me if you're on my network" stuff is to prevent this type of thing from happening.