Question about Outlook Express

I have had two other email addresses set up for sometime now and they stopped receiving incoming emails.  Both accounts under options have a error cannot connect to the SMTP servers.  I have no other problem getting the emails in windows 8 version of mail and I can also get them on my iphone with the exact same settings.  I've had this problem before and stopped using outlook because of it.

Then I always had to delete the email account and start over then it would work for months and quit again.  I got sick of re-setting up the accounts each time.  Now I tried deleting one of them and I still get the same error in the account options, cannot connect to SMTP servers please check your settings.  Well I did not change anything and like I stated, the same settings work with other devices.

I want to use outlook because I like its features, but if this is going to start happening again, I'm done with it.

I need an answer soon or I'm changing to Yahoo mail.

Please help.