Another Tuesday technical tip.

I use 3’s mobile internet service – which works well for me (although I’ve never ventured much out side a city conurbation with it.)

Maybe their offering is aimed at the mass market of Hotmail users – but if you are a traditional e-mail client user it’s worth noting they don’t (appear) to have their own SMTP (outgoing email) server.

Furthermore they appear to block all traffic on Port 25 – thus when I tried to connect to a particular SMTP server, which uses authenticated SMTP I couldn’t. This confused me – as the last time I’d used this “laptop and email client not on regular network” combo was via the free wi-fi in McDonalds (yes I know but in my defence I was meeting someone*) it had worked.

The solution was to connect via a secure connection which uses a different port. Also made me think not necessarily a bad thing using secure connections.

* I’m generally not a big fan of fast food, but in this case the drive through next to the Motorway exit made for a convenient no sat-nav required congregation point.