Use Gmail as a Secure SMTP Server
As part of my job I visit a lot of client sites throughout the week, frequently connecting my laptop(s) to various LANs. I also work on my home network and various WiFi hotsports. Needless to say, I’m attaching and detaching to a lot of networks throughout the week. In fact I’m typing this from a Starbucks in Orange, California, USA.
More and more networks are blocking port 25 (SMTP) to prevent spam from being sent from their network. As an Outlook user that makes my life difficult because, unlike Apple’s Mail.app, which can automatically work with multiple SMTP settings, each email account is mapped to one single set of SMTP server settings at a time, and when I switch networks I have to go in and manually make changes in about 3 different screens per account. I usually have to do this 3-5 times a day and it’s a hassle.
I’ve considered for some time to switching my email to be hosted by Google Apps, and I’m still leaning that way, mainly for spam filtering. However one other main reason is that I’d have one SMTP server that doesn’t run on port 25, so my SMTP traffic won’t be blocked (assuming they don’t block Gmail’s port 587). Also, Gmail’s SMTP servers uses TLS for encrypting outgoing messages, so network nodes between me and Gmail can’t read my outgoing email. Well, in a short-term fix to this problem I just set up my Outlook to use Gmail as an SMTP server, but kept my POP settings the same.
Just follow these instructions for configuring POP with Outlook 2007 but ignore the POP settings and just setup the SMTP settings using your Gmail account. It’s working fine for me now!
