Hawk Wings » SMTP

Emailing from Starbucks: What port 587 is for

Tim Gaden — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 13:53:51 +0000

Scott Davis has made an important discovery about SMTP ports. As a result, he no longer has to choose between email and coffee.

Setting his outgoing SMTP server in Mail.app to use port 587 means that he can now knock back his lattes at Starbucks and send emails at the same time.

The breakthrough came after years of frustration. He didn’t want to sacrifice the beauty of Apple Mail for a web-based service that would have provided him with a work-around for Starbuck’s blocked port 25:

I used Yahoo mail as my primary client for years. But once I got started using Mail.app, the thought of going back is singularly unappealing. (Yeah, GMail as well…) Plus, I’ve started to depend more and more on Spotlight to retrace my steps. (“I said what? When? To who? What was I thinking?”) Doing a non-insignificant portion of my emailing out of band was really beginning to cramp my style.

Gmail may not be the answer, but Google was his friend:

… what pushed me over the edge was the fact that port 25 was progressively getting blocked in more and more places. Starbucks, hotels, and finally my Mom’s Wifi connection at home. Allow me to repeat that in case you missed it: I COULDN’T EMAIL FROM MY MOM’S HOUSE. Something had to change.

Out of desperation, I Googled “apple starbucks send email”. At the end of one message thread, someone cryptically suggested changing port 25 to 587. No explanation, and no report back of whether it succeeded or not. I began Googling more: “starbucks port 587″, “secure smtp port 587″, etc. Apparently, all of the cool kids use port 25 for server-to-server communication and use port 587 for message submission.

Gmail offers port 465 with SSL for its smtp.gmail.com server, although it rewrites the from address on any email sent that way to identify you by your Gmail address, unless you set another email address as your default in Gmail’s settings (see more on this at Lifehacker). Not always a good look.

Fastmail offers port 26 and 465 with SSL as work-arounds.

.Mac likes port 587.

Your ISP might offer a way to extend your stay in Starbucks too.starbucks, port 25, sending email, mail.app, apple mail, smtp, block port, latteSimilar Posts:

Postfix Enabler 1.2: Be your own mail server

Tim Gaden — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:10:00 +0000

Postfix Enabler is a graphic front-end to built-in services in Mac OS X that helps you to set up your computer to be its own mail server, that is to run its own SMTP, POP3 and IMAP services, with or without SSL support.

It also provides SSL test certs so that you can test the SSL connection. Going the other way, it offers an option to turn on SMTP-AUTH on the server, so that you can authorise remote users who need to send mail through it.

Plus, mobile users can use it to set up a roving SMTP server so that they can send mail wherever they are, whenever they want, so long as they have an Internet connection.

Version 1.2 has just been released which packages the app as a universal binary.

PostFix Enabler costs USD 9.99 and is available from the developerâ€™s website .mail server, postfix, SMTP, IMAP, ssl, pop, universal binarySimilar Posts:

Posting .Mac mail when Port 25 is blocked

Tim Gaden — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 15:32:04 +0000

macOSXHints has a tip on how to send emails from your .Mac account when port 25 is blocked.

It is complicated and will only work for people who use IMAP with their .Mac accounts. The process involves saving all your emails as drafts, logging into .Mac’s web interface and then sending them.

If you find yourself on a network that blocks port 25 (the default port for SMTP traffic) make sure that you try the alternative port 587 first by changing the settings in the Accounts pane of your Preferences before looking around for a more complicated solution. Similar Posts: