Email in France

Many people have discovered that on arriving in France their email sending when using Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora etc. suddenly stops functioning. Emails arrive as usual but they cannot reply or send their emails which either refuse to go and sit there or appear to go, only for the sender to receive an email informing them that they cannot be delivered. This is very frustrating and perplexing particularly when the sending of emails worked perfectly in the Channel Islands or the U.K. just prior to their departure.

The natural reaction is to blame whichever server they use for their emails (perhaps where their website or company website is hosted) or a foreign server such as for instance Jerseymail, surecw.com, GMail for which email addresses Outlook etc has been set up. Please remember tha Orange with beret t using web - based email, in other words going to the Hotmail, Jerseymail or GMail etc websites and sending mail is not affected it is only when using Outlook etc. set up to receive and send emails that the problems arise.

For many people internet technicalities are a mystery however to give a brief and hopefully not too technical an explanation, the problem rests with Orange who last year suddenly blocked port 25 to anything but smtp.orange.fr so that emails have to be sent via Orange. The reason for this is apparently an effort to reduce spam - which we would all love to see happen - but is a thorough and unexpected nuisance to those people not in the know.

We have found that the problem can be rectified by - using Outlook as an example - going to Tools, then Email Accounts, then View or change existing email accounts, going to the email address in question and changing the outgoing mail to smtp.orange.fr and then going to More Settings and unticking the box by My Outgoing Server (smtp) requires authentication. Click OK which takes you back to the other settings and then Finish. This ensures that the emails go out via the Orange server, which is what Orange want.

I am told that it is not just in France that the port gets blocked so when travelling elsewhere in Europe the situation may also crop up.

If anyone reading this can come up with better information or solutions, we would be glad to know however this is just a brief and hopefully helpful solution from "non teckies" for "non teckies".