Technosailor - Latest Comments in How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

David Lopan — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:48:35 -0000

Try this instead.
http://cutedgesystems.com/s...
it's cheap and it works.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Sean — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:45:27 -0000

If you are just looking to be able to send email from any internet connection with your regular Mac email client, here is an approach I posted about that works well for me:
http://longtailend.com/inde...

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Aaron Brazell — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:56:54 -0000

Yeah Zach... tries that. Doesn't seem to work. We're moving to a new server cluster and I'm thinking when that is done, I need to make some other options available for mail.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Zach — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:30:24 -0000

Entourage does support StartTLS and it does support outgoing on port 587. However, it doesn't support both at the same time, which is fairly stupid. I was not aware of this until I did a quick google search to confirm.

What you have to do for Entourage is use port 465 and SSL. I don't know how widely it's supported, however I'd assume that it's supported by all mail providers that support 587 with StartTLS, considering the problem also affects Outlook, which most users use.

I found a page on yale.edu that does a good job of showing how to configure this.

http://www.yale.edu/its/ema...

I still stand by statement that running postfix on your local machine is a stupid idea. There are too many problems associated with sending directly from wherever you happen to be for this to be considered anything but a last-ditch solution.

If you run Postfix on your own mail server, you can easily enable port 465 (aka smtps) in /etc/postfix/master.cf. Set the args to "-o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes" and you've effectively duplicated the setup for port 587.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Earl Stutes — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:58:19 -0000

I have one correction to make to the fine article. The command

sudo chown -R 0:0 Postfix

should be

sudo chown -R 27:29 Postfix.

I believe. Postfix already has passwd/group entrys and for security reasons, should not be the ROOT user.

=eas=

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Larry — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:39:11 -0000

I predict that anyone foolish enough to try this will be rewarded by losing random email from ISP's that block SMTP from dynamic IP addresses.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

lvlolvlo — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:54:10 -0000

Why not just use port 587 and not worry about failing an SPF or other ms (=! m$) check so your e-mail reaches the intended party.

Plus not to mention if you send e-mail to certain ISPs they do not allow mail from dynamic hosts (which I assume most of you will be using because you don't have a static ms setup)

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Aaron Brazell — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 13:45:27 -0000

Actually, Zach, it's not the "stupidest way". In fact I control my own servers and I have TLS auth required. If you actually comprehended what I said, you'd notice I said I used Entourage. And if you know Entourage, there is no TLS support built in. There's also no TLS included in Outlook 2003 either but at least Outlook gracefully falls back on SSL where Entourage doesn't.

So yeah, it might not be the best way but I had very legit reasons for doing it this way.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Zach — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 13:41:16 -0000

This has to be the stupidest way to "send mail from everywhere" I've ever seen.

Basically every email provider worth going with has port 587 open. They also have TLS and SMTP auth enabled.

Turning these on in Mail.app and Thunderbird are simple. Last time I had to setup Mail.app these settings were turned on by default, even. I think Mail.app checks to see if they're supported now.

The advantages of doing this? You don't have to worry about port 25 blocks. Your mail always comes from the same source, so you don't have to worry about being on IP space that's been blacklisted.

The disadvantages? You can't say you run your own mail server. I really can't think of any more.

As time goes on, you'll only have adjust this more, or wait to send mail until you get to a location it actually works from. Better to use the proper SMTP server via port 587 and be done with it.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

David — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:59:45 -0000

An even easier solution - and a great way to setup a secure, alternate port so you can SMTP anywhere...

http://www.cutedgesystems.c...

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Mac — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:51:35 -0000

Thanks for the Article. It is definitely help full. Technically with any blog installation your local webserver you should be able to do that as well.

<a href="www.mostofmymac.com" rel="nofollow">www.mostofmymac.com</a>
to help you get the most out of your mac...

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Brent — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:35:09 -0000

<i>First you need to download postfix. Extract it to the Desktop.</i>

That's a <strong>postfix startup script</strong>. Postfix is already installed on your mac, and instead of having it run 24/7, you could just fire it up when needed by running:

sudo postfix start

in a Terminal.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:15:56 -0000

The far easier solution -- for Mac and Windows -- is to set up a Gmail account and use their SMTP server. Since their SMTP server requires authentication, I think they even allow relay.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Omar — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:22:37 -0000

You can configure SMTP with authentication in your mail server(most ISP´s have it). That also works.

Omar

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Brandon Eley — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:57:26 -0000

I've got everything configured, including port 587 and am still not able to send.

Also, there may be some issues sending email from your own SMTP server, like recipient's mail server thinking you're sending SPAM.

I'll keep tinkering with it, but I think it might be easier just to set my web server to a different port.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Aaron Brazell — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:48:55 -0000

Bren: I'm a Unix guy, remember. ;-)

Brian: firewall blocking port 25?

MRZ: the bottom line is you need the line MAILSERVER=-YES- in the file. If the MAILSERVER line exists, great Make sure it is set to -YES-. If it doesn't exist, add it.

Brandon, Rom, McGu: You can configure it to go out on port 587, but that is not in this how-to.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

McGu — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:25:32 -0000

Hey guys, there are numerous articles on apples website under the support tab. Basically, if you just go to the server settings and under the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) change it to port 587, it should work no matter where you are. I travel frequently and have yet to experience problems. I woudl frequently encounter problems sending my mail if I used the standard port 25, but since I changed it nearly 2 years ago, it works flawlessly.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Joel Bradshaw — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:01:55 -0000

Re: Blocked port 25.
Use a tunneling program, like putty (which is windows)
'Google' for ssh tunnel thunderbird
This should get you info on how to do it.
Google for open ssh macintosh and you should find a mac program which works like putty. (no flames please, windows at work, mac at home) where I don't need ssh...

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Christian — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:58:10 -0000

This is one of those "why didn't I think of this" ideas. After messing around with smtp server authentication and TLS, your solution is so much simpeler! Great idea! However, when sending from certain IP addresses, the mail could be caught in spamtraps if the reverse address mappings or the FQDN with which the smtp server anounces itself are not right.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Rom — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:09:56 -0000

Well, the thing is - some ISPs block port 25 preventing you from sending email. It might be a good idea to use a different port to send. :)

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Juan Magdaraog — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 05:24:47 -0000

thanks for the good tip. have you tried setting up a gmail account and using gmail's smtp to send emails?

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

danny — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 04:53:12 -0000

this won't work if your ISP 'like here in belgium' block port 25 for everything besides their own smtp hosts.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Brandon Eley — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:51:54 -0000

That's cool - does it go out on port 25? Most ISP's that want you to use their outgoing servers block port 25. Would having your mac act as a server get around that?

I'm going to give this a try and see - I work from 3 different locations, all of which restrict SMTP mail to their own servers.

Thanks for the tip!

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

MRZ — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:42:04 -0000

Does "MAILSERVER" have to be -YES- or -NO-?

You write that if the line exists in /etc/hostconfig you have to change it to -NO-, but if it does not exist you have to add it with -YES-.

That seems strange to me.

Re: How To Configure your Mac to Send Mail Regardless of Where you Are

Guest — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:32:23 -0000

Thanks for the tip. I followed the instructions above on my MacBook, but no luck. When I use the server setting I get an error message in Mail, "Cannot send message usingthe server 127.0.0.1"
Hmmmm.....