I'm looking for an elegant solution to a problem which, I believe,
must affect a lot of notebook computer users.

At home, my ISP is Cox, and Cox has a rule: While you are connected to
their service, you can only use the Cox SMTP server; email sent to all
other servers is blocked. Conversely, when you are connected to any
other service, you are prohibited from using the Cox SMTP server.

Because of this rule, I must be careful when I send email. If I'm
connected through Cox, I must make sure I'm sending my email to the
Cox server. If I'm connected through a wireless provider, on the other
hand, I must make sure I'm sending my email to a non-Cox server. This
is a real nuisance, and it invites mistakes. I often find that email I
sent hours ago did not go through because I neglected to specify the
proper account.

From my understanding, this situation is common. Many major ISPs
enforce this same troublesome rule. For this reason, I would expect
email software to provide an elegant way of managing the problem. I
use Outlook 2003, however, and I find that the opposite is true --
with Outlook, I must manually specify the email account for almost
every outgoing email message.

To elaborate, I will explain that Outlook allows me to set up multiple
email accounts -- one using the Cox server and one using a non-Cox
server -- but there seems to be no way to make it automatically choose
the account for outgoing messages based on my current internet
connection. In fact, Outlook actually makes the situation worse by
automatically using the incoming account as the outgoing account for
replies; because of this, I can't even expect a default outgoing
account, and must manually review the account for every reply.

My questions a
1) Does Outlook have some features I've overlooked, which do a better
job of handling this particular situation?
2) Does other software, like Thunderbird, have a good solution to this
problem?


-TC