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TMC Travel Tips: Take an Outgoing Mail Server with You
Here's a tip from one of our readers that helps address one of the most common problems the Road Warrior faces: sending email.
Receiving email is relatively easy, but getting an outgoing mail or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server to cooperate can be a challenge. Some are password protected, some identify by the IP address you are trying to send from, and there are often issues of certain domains being blocked. Whatever the problem, it adds up to time wasted trying to find a combination that lets you communicate with the outside world.
A couple methods of getting around this were addressed in the Art of Traveling With Your Mac session, but Jeff Spivack, a member of the Nantes (France) area Macintosh User Group, Mac'EDUC, has a solution that should work anywhere: take your own SMTP server with you. Jeff explains:
You know that in order to receive email, most people use a POP server. That server is at your ISP, and you can get to it via any internet connection. The equivalent for sending mail is an SMTP server.
Most ISP's don't allow you to send mail through their SMTP server if you're not directly connected to them--it's a way to fight spam. So if you're on the road, your ISP - whose server you've configured on your email account as "outgoing mail" server or something like that - won't let you send your mail because you're not connected to their network - you're logged on to some hotel network, or someone else's office network.
The classic workaround is to reconfigure your email software temporarily to use the local SMTP server, so that if, say, you were in France, connecting to the internet through the leading French ISP, you would set your SMTP server to smtp.wanadoo.fr. But that means digging through configuration files, and finding out the SMTP server of the ISP you're connected to.
But Mac OS X has a built-in outgoing mailserver. In Jaguar, it was Sendmail; in Panther, it's Postfix. But by default, it's disabled. You can enable it very easily using the Sendmail Enabler or Postfix Enabler.
Then you can set your outgoing mailserver to "localhost", and send mail from anywhere in the world without having to change your settings - because you are your own outgong mail server!
I hope that's helpful; you can get more ino on SMTP servers by reading:
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Jeff's solution will take only a few minutes to implement and can save you aggrevation and precious time when you're under deadline to get that proposal emailed to a client or back to the office.
If you have a travel tip to share or comment on this series, send it to [email protected]. We will consider adding it to our collection of advice for those who work and play with their Macs on the road.
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