Rescue from failing drives #24146691

Just wanted to thank you (mdgm) for your really constructive support from Down Under. I now have a fit and healthy NV+ (Sparc) once again. The steps I took in the end were as follows:
1. Split the default NTFS partition on brand new 2Tb USB drive (WD My Passport) while mounted from PC/Win7 into two volumes: one approx. 800Gb ExtFAT for direct access from PC and the rest left as NTFS for dedicated ReadyNAS backup.
2. Attached the USB drive to NV+ and formatted the NTFS partition as EXT3.
3. Changed security mode from "share" to "user" in order to be able to access the USB drive EXT3 partition (this was an unexpected glitch requiring a search of this forum to resolve)
4. Created, ran and verified backup jobs for each share on NV+. Great relief that dodgy HDDs survived this operation.
5. Updated firmware to 4.1.14 to allow 4k sector partition alignment of new HDDs and and saved configuration.
6. Powered off the NV+, removed the 2 suspect HDDs, blew out the dust and replaced with 2 new WD Red 2Tb drives.
7. Powered NV+ on and followed basic X-RAID setup.
8. Ran Factory Default from FrontView. Interestingly, device retained its static IP address on my home network - nice.
9. Restored backups from USB drive to NV+ and verified OK.
10. Installed Paragon ExtFS on PC to allow viewing the EXT3 backup volume.

So at this stage I have a fully operational system and no data loss - wonderful. But I'm having trouble with step 11 - setting up email alerts. Using the same settings for my email account that work fine in various email clients, I just get a "Failed to reach SMTP server" message. Could this be a problem with my antivirus program/firewall settings and can mdgm or anyone suggest a workaround? Are there any specifics to describe the traffic that the NV+ attempts to send in case I need to describe the problem to my ISP or mail hosting company?

Thanks again for support with 1-9, the icing on the cake would be help with 11. Cheers.