After trying to talk her through several simple solutions, I agreed to make a visit to her house and look at the problems she was reporting. I found out that she had changed her dialup adapter's phone number to her own phone number, thus explaining the busy signals always being reported.

I brought up her copy of Outlook Express and looked at her settings for her mail account. Everything was in order, the inbound and outbound mail servers were correct. Her UserID and Passwords were correct. I tested her e-mail program by send a message from her computer to her own mail account.  When the messages tried to transmit, only my test message went through successfully. 

When I examined the outbound messages, I discovered that she had manually typed many of the addresses incorrectly, such as leaving the .com off the end, forgetting to put the '@' before the domain name, typing the recipient's real name instead of their e-mail address.

One address should have been correct, looked okay visually, but the rejection message from the mail server was (note this is a bogus address):

  ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<best@texas.net>
  (reason: 550 5.1.1 <best@texas.net>... User unknown)

When I tried to explain that this message meant that this address was a bad address, she brought out a printed copy of an e-mail message from that address. It was dated nearly three years ago. When I commented on the date, she explained that she had just received another message from this same person recently. I went into her deleted messages and found the message. The sender had changed over to a new ISP and her address had changed.

I changed her Outlook Express to activate the option to automatically add the original sender's e-mail address to her address book if she replied to that person.  Then I taught her how to use the address book when she was sending a new message to that person, or how to add the address first before sending a new message for the first time. She now knows that every e-mail address must have the same format, 'UserID' with the '@' sign in the middle, followed by the domain name of their ISP or company.  This seems simple to those of us who have been using the Internet for years, but for many users who just started using a computer or the Internet for the first time, it may not always seem so simple.

In another case, I was receiving e-mail from one of the list servers for which I am the administrator. I begin getting some complaints from other users on the list about inappropriate messages from a few users. The entire problem was solved with a simple explanation on how list servers work and how to pay attention to the actual return address that was displayed when they used their 'reply' or 'reply all' button on their e-mail program.

Check your e-mail program for the option to 'auto add' the sender's address to your address book if you are having problems sending mail to a person on a regular basis. In Eudora E-mail,you can highlight a message and press the control key and the letter K to add the sender's address to your address book. If you normally choose to manually enter the addresses, check to see that there are no spaces or punctuation in the address, other than the '@' sign and the period in front of com or net, etc. One common error is for the user to type a comma in place of the period.