problem with outgoing mail in Outlook 2002(XP)

[mukluk123]

I'm having a problem with Outlook 2002 that comes bundled with Office XP. When several users attempt to send mail through our SMTP server from outside the network through the internet, they authenticate fine (e.g. they dont get a mail saying they failed to relay) but the SMTP server times out. I am an admin so i viewed what was going on when these users logged on and tryed to relay and for some reason under "current sessions" their user name is listed as the name of their local computer on their home workgroup. when i click properties of the user it says the user doesnt exist. but they seem to authenticate fine cause their settings are right in outlook.

Whats weird is that some of the same users use other computers with outlook 2000 with the exact same settings and everything works fine. is there anyway i can fix this (settings on their computer) other than telling people to switch to a previous version of Outlook.
Thanks,
Matt

 

[mukluk123]

ok update on the situation. I told a user to switch their settings to relay through their ISP's SMTP server and everything went through fine. but again that is still weird because they have other accounts that dont relay their ISP's SMTP and they work fine. So i do consider this problem solved but if anyone can shed some light on why it works with outlook 2000 and not outlook 2002 and SMTP relaying works with some accounts but not others
Thanks, Matt