You know what Tech... You're right and I do apologize for throwing in those barbs. I didn't conduct myself professionally and I admit that.
However, at least consolidating the outlook threads was a good suggestion.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my personal machine is different and I can only find one thing. I have many (50+) email accounts (postmaster@, abuse@, ipadmin@, etc) and several are configured different than "normal".
1) Some companies use different MX & A records for their domains. When the registrar is Network Solutions and you do this, the resolver is unreliable and you can't use mail.domain.com for POP3 and SMTP. You have to use an IP address in those fields.
2) Lots of ISP's block port 25 for outgoing mail (even some commercial providers do this). So, port 26 is used as a mirror on most linux servers. I have accounts using 26 and and others using 25.
Thanks for giving me that "wake-up" Tech... my apology is sincere.
I hope you find this to be a little more constructive