Before doing anything else. When you try to send, do you get an error message of any kind? Write it down. You'll need that information.

There's not much reason to scan emails for viruses when you're sending them. Of course you want to scan them coming in, but you wouldn't deliberately send a virus to someone, would you? Most antivirus programs can be set to scan incoming, but not outgoing, mail. This often helps.

Did you attach a file? How big is it, in megabytes? If you don't know, find out. More than 1 or 2 megabytes, it will take a long time to send and will possibly be refused by the other person's mailserver anyway. (Many ISP's mailservers refuse files bigger than about 6 MB.)

Sending mail through the SMTP server of your broadband provider used to work, but the problems with this setup are increasing. Some can't send at all, some find messages to gmail are refused.

If you're using an address @riverland.net.au you should use the mail.riverland.net.au outgoing server. There are some other settings that have to change too: see below. If you haven't used this before, your account may not be enabled for it: contact us to check.

Riverland email settings

“Authorisation” just means “is the server going to accept your message”. There are several ways you can be authorised.

• If you're on ISP X's network, the server will have your IP address in its list, and may accept mail from you with no extra settings.
• Some servers allow you to send from any IP address, as long as you log in. If you can't login, they won't accept your mail.

If you don't have one of these working for you, the outgoing server will say “Relay denied” or “Unauthorised”.

You send a message, but you get back a failure notice. It may look like a form letter, but do read it - it's the best troubleshooting information. If it doesn't mean anything to you, forward it to your friendly local IT person.