(1)

I am receiving my new e-mails perfectly fine from hotmail but when I try to send out a message it attempts to send for a long time, eventually giving me the following message:

"Sending of message failed.
The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server hotmail.com failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again, or else contact your network administrator."


under account settings for my hotmail account, "Hotmail- hotmail.com" is selected and under Outgoing server (SMTP) the following is shown:

Description: Hotmail
server: hotmail.com
Port: 1025
username: [my username]@hotmail.com
server connection: TLS if available

Port 1025 is what I set for the server setting for the accounts (had to do this to get the green light on the POP, SMTP and IMAP servers in Thunderbird). I tried changing it to 1026, not knowing if outgoing needed a different port than in-coming and that didn't help-- still can't send out messages.




(2)

Also, when I try to click on links in messages in my in-box, particularly php links, it asks me which program to open them with, the default being Kate. I tried to change it to firefox by browsing to it in /usr/bin/firefox, but it just opens an empty tab in firefox, reopening the pop-up that asks which program to handle the php link with.






How can I fix thunderbird to send hotmail (and other accounts' messages)?



How can I have thunderbird handle links automatically and correctly by clicking them?

Read the FAQs and check out the Forum at the Webmail site for some pretty decent support for these extensions. They've helped me out quite a bit there in the past.

http://webmail.mozdev.org/

I have run into that before. I don't have hotmail, but have gotten quite frustrated until I found a typo.
I suggest to closely review your settings and compare them to the hotmail requirements for smtp.