Recently I had to send 22MB of documents interstate from my laptop - urgently!
I split the files up into small chunks and attached each one an email - they sat in Outlook's "out" box for ages and didn't budge - aaarrrgh! When I tried to delete a message, Outlook froze and I had to ctrl-alt-del out of it.

After reinstalling the email accounts and then Outlook itself with no improvement, I decided to fire up my old PC (just back from the shop with XP reinstalled), installed Outlook on that and tried sending the emails again.
The messages sat frozen in the out box just like they did on the laptop.
My browsers still worked OK so that ruled out the ADSL modem or line.
Perhaps it was a server problem (I use Telstra BigPond , Australia's biggest ISP).

I cancelled afternoon appointments and spent an hour on the phone with BigPond tech support - he, with a voice sounding like it was computer generated and coming from outer space, insisted I cancel & re-install my email accounts.
In vain I explained that the problem happened on two different computers and that my browsers worked OK, so to humour him I did what he asked and of course it didn't work.
I could receive email but couldn't send any.
He went away for a couple hours then called me back to say "they are working on it" but wouldn't give any more information.

So I got myself a gmail account, sent the emails, and settled down in a bad mood to read the paper before fixing dinner.
I read a "text to the editor" from a person complained that it wasn't good enough that Telstra BigPond's outgoing mail servers had been down for more than a day and might not be fixed for some time!

Why the #@%&*! couldn't BigPond tech support have told me that, or perhaps he didn't know his servers were down in the first place?