Email security settings

My PC and my wife's PC have not been able to send mail via Outlook 2016 or Thunderbird or Windows Mail off an on since October, continuously since mid-December.

All settings are confirmed over and over on both machines.

Have spoken with both Tier I and Tier II technicians who all said the same things: check settings, re-new passwords, delete and re-establish accounts. None of these solutions work. Forum mods told us to write to Cox and Cox techs exchanged emails with us with the same tired advice. Nothing works.

Outlook, both 2003 and 2016 worked fine until Cox started changing email systems.

Now all we can do is receive mail on our web clients. We cannot send mail. And Cox keeps peppering us with emails threatening to stop all sending and receiving from our accounts "until they are corrected." The accounts are set up exactly according to Cox specs.

This is a Cox problem. I refuse to use the webmail system as I have 20+ years of Outlook files that I constantly refer to and re-use as tutorials and seminars for our club members. So we do send a lot of repeat mail but we are not spammers and we have a limited number of members, perhaps 20-30.

I've had Cox for 22 years. Thanks to cable industry lobbying in Congress, our alternative sources for high speed internet are extremely limited. Cox has a virtual monopoly in some areas of San Diego and no doubt in other cities as well. As soon as I can find a viable alternative, I will switch. Until then I will curse Cox every day that I sit down and struggle with email that used to be an effortless process until they started monkeying with the system.

$225 A month for this? Rubbish. I'll never recommend Cox to anyone, ever again.