Email sending problems abroad

[#1]

I am having persistent difficulty sending emails from a hotel WiFi in Norway.  I have re-read all the advice about ensuring that I have set the email client to authenticate with relay.force9.net, and have also tried using a friend's SMTP server that I tend to use when this happens.  Nothing has worked so far.  The hotel insists that its system (hosted on AS2116.net) is not blocking this kind of access, although my confidence in this assertion is not high.  I am using the Windows Mail client on a Windows 8 RT tablet, and have also tried using the Outlook client on the same device.
All the messages I get suggest that the problem is with connecting to or authenticating with the SMTP server.
Can you suggest anything else I can do to resolve this, apart from going to webmail, which I hate?

[#2]

For SMTP are you using port 25? You could try port 587 instead. To authenticate are you using the same username and password credentials as you use when collecting mail (alternatively you can use the values for the default or a different mailbox)? And *not* trying to use SSL/TLS security?

[#3]

Thanks for the ideas, but the SSL stuff was all correct and port 587 brings no solution either. Good to eliminate these though.

[#4]

If you have access to a command prompt window on your device you can check authentication using telnet. The procedure is descibed in the Community Support Library article Testing SMTP Authentification using Telnet.
Note that you have to Base64 encode your username and password entries to use this. Typing QUIT will terminate the server dialogue though it will soon time out.

[#5]

Many thanks for this, which may come in useful in future.  I have now checked out of the hotel and am using WiFi on board ship, which is suddenly working fine.  I conclude that it was indeed the hotel's system that was causing the entire problem.