Here is another wrinkle to the story. I just spent quite some time on with VZW CS to try to figure out why I could receive emails while on a Wifi connection but not send emails.

Background to this is that I do not have a data plan on the phone and in fact have a block on data to prevent unpleasant surprises on my bill. I will be spending an extended length of time out of the country and don't need a data plan while I am here since if I need to check email, I have found it very easy in this interim before leaving the country, to get access to local wifi spots.

The problem is that while I can receive emails while connected to wifi, I have been unable to send emails. I have registered for Verizon's outgoing SMTP option and the password has been registered (as verified on the call to VZW)so that isn't the probem.

The VZW CS person told me that the reason I can't send emails while on wifi is that the device can only send emails when connected to the VZW network data plan. This seems illogical since I can receive emails. After quite some time and her agreeing that it didn't seem logical, she put me through to Samsung 2nd line support. Their answer was - you guessed it - DO A HARD RESET. Since the Samsung technician didn't seem to know why this problem was ocurring and in fact said they didn't support this stuff, I politely declined to do a hard reset.

My questions then are:

1. Is it true that I can only send email if I have a data plan despite being able to receive them while on wifi

2. Since I also cannot send or receive Picture text messages with the block on my data plan, what is the best and most error proof way of making sure that if i remove the data block, my device never accesses VZW data plan