"An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions" while using SMTP

Please confirm that your firewall is allowing outbound traffic and that you are not being blocked by antivirus software.

I received the same issue and the culprit was antivirus software.


Ok, so very important to realize the implications here.

Docs say that SSL over 465 is NOT supported in SmtpClient.

Seems like you have no choice but to use STARTTLS which may not be supported by your mail host. You may have to use a different library if your host requires use of SSL over 465.

Quoted from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.smtpclient.enablessl(v=vs.110).aspx

The SmtpClient class only supports the SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security as defined in RFC 3207. In this mode, the SMTP session begins on an unencrypted channel, then a STARTTLS command is issued by the client to the server to switch to secure communication using SSL. See RFC 3207 published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for more information.

An alternate connection method is where an SSL session is established up front before any protocol commands are sent. This connection method is sometimes called SMTP/SSL, SMTP over SSL, or SMTPS and by default uses port 465. This alternate connection method using SSL is not currently supported.


I got this error:

System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions

when the port was used by another program.