Comments on Latest 3.0.4

I do understand the issue, and having worked for an ISP I know exactly the issue at hand and my solution is how it SHOULD be done. An application should not be correcting for an issue with an ISP. The mail host should have an alternate configuration to get around SMTP port blocks, and I'm 80% sure if you were to ask them, they'd give the alternate information, or a permanent fix without cost. My ISP has the standard port 25 settings, but we also have an alternate for port 587 for these issues. Gmail does the same thing, as does email from many, if not all, hosting companies.

I should add, I had this issue before when I was jumping between Dialup at home, high-speed at work, and a cable broadband connection at my parent's house, setting it to the correct bypass settings allowed it to work fine everywhere with no issues whatsoever.

Without any further information on the email provider I can't be more specific with the information, as it varies from provider to provider.

As for the size column, in your message list, at the top, to the VERY right of the column list is an icon if you click that will give you a list of all the columns you can display. You can add/remove them as you wish from here.

-Michael

It is just that maybe you didn't quite follow his explanation.

First off, for point 4, to add a size column.... Across the top of the message list there is the row of column headers. Mine reads From Subject Date star then a little graphic directly above the scrollbar that is meant to represent a tabular view. If you left click on this graphic, it is the field chooser, and should allow you to add the size column.

Secondly, the roaming support for sending mail.

Your problem is basically caused by one of two issues (or possibly both).
When anyone, anywhere, sends email by SMTP, the server they are connecting to needs to know for sure who they are. There are several ways to achieve this. Standard ISPs do this by the very simple method of knowing that you are on their network, and who is connected in on what account as what IP address at the time. This means that if you are on the "home network" of an ISP email server, you don't need to do anything at all special, and it will simply work. However, if you are not on the "home" network, then they cannot track who you are by your IP address, so need to use an alternative method. This is usually done using authenticated SMTP, which will mean that you have to manually tick a box, and enter a username and password (or tick a second box to say use the same as for POP/IMAP). This allows the ISP to know who you are, and that you are authorised to send mail through their server no matter where you connect from. BUT, it will only work if the ISP supports it.

There is a second issue in that many residential ISPs block all traffic to port 25 apart from their own servers. This is to prevent spam.

Because of this second issue, some ISPs offer an alternative port (often 587) which you can use to send out email if you are on a remote network, but this port will always require authentication.

What this means, is that for each of your email accounts, you are going to need to contact their tech support people, explain that you wish to send email out on the account from a different internet connection, and ask what settings are appropriate for the outgoing server for each of those cases. Noone else can zen what these answers will be, we can only give you common examples.

If you cannot get a valid answer from one or more of them, then I would recommend that you create a gmail account, add the mail addresses to that account as vaild to send from (not to collect the mail, just so gmail knows of them), and then configure google's outbound server for all your traffic all the time. If everything is properly set up in Thunderbird, you should never have to mess with the settings, and it should basically work wherever you are.

Finally, on your receipt question, it isn't a bad design. You are implicitly telling thunderbird that you are online, so it can send mail immediately, then you are telling it to send a mail. Of course it will send it immediately. You could very simply change this behaviour by setting Thunderbird into offline mode before reading the mail, since you do not wish to send, so it will queue the messages. Alternatively, you can alter its receipt behaviour so that it will prompt you before sending them at all, allowing you to choose whether to send them or not.

that you have to pay for such service. Here in europe I believe all mail providers, particularly those which are not an ISP themselves, do use authenticated SMTP traffic for long time and we do not pay extra for that. The more free service they offer the earlier they did start with that.
They have no other means of checking after all, they have no IP range themselves to borrow to the user.

They even still keep the older POP-before SMTP authentication, since there are still lot of mail clients around not able to do SMTP authentication at all.

The more difficult are those old standard ISP, they simply have nothing more the IP chek authentication for their SMTP, they can use port 25 in open mode only (IP authent only) and are not even able to offer some 587 or SSL ports.
So in recent times, they use their own servers still with p25 open, traffic in transit, that means when I use other SMTP then their own and have proper authentication at beginning, they force us to move to 587 so they don't have to watch us if we use authentication or not (587 is authent only).
In other words, it saves them computing power, since traffic pointed to port 25 of any server other then their own would have to be scanned for authentication on the fly before it is released to the outside world. This is the only reason, or at least I can not see any other.