Ms Office Tune Up

On the Internet, Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) is the protocol that describes the format of Internet email messages and how messages get delivered. To facilitate this, your Internet service provider (ISP) runs an SMTP server (perhaps more than one) that handles your outgoing mail. When you set up an account in Outlook, it always asks you for the name of this server, which it calls the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP). This name usually takes the form mail.isp.com, where isp.com is your ISP’s domain name. When you send a message in Outlook, the program contacts the SMTP server and passes along your mes­sage. The server then routes the message toward its recipient or recipients.

This admirably straightforward sequence of events is complicated somewhat by the fact that many (now, perhaps most) ISPs insist that all their customers’ outgoing mail go through the ISP’s SMTP server. This makes sense for your email accounts from that ISP, but it also means that third-party accounts-for example, accounts provided by your Web site or blog-hosting company-have to go through the ISP’s SMTP server, as well. This can create problems:

• Your ISP might refuse to send messages that use the third-party account. The usual cause of this is that the ISP believes you’re a spammer surreptitiously trying to relay the message through the ISP’s SMTP server.
• Your ISP might at some point refuse to send messages from any of your accounts because you’ve bumped up against the ISP’s monthly limits on SMTP bandwidth or total messages sent.
• Many ISP SMTP servers are busy, so it might take a while for your message to go through the server, particularly if the ISP gives higher priority to its own accounts.

For all these problems, you are better off if you can send messages from your third-party account directly to the third party’s own SMTP server. The third-party server should not think you are a spammer, you are less likely to hit bandwidth or message limits if you split your messages between servers (and many third-parties have no such limits), and your mes­sage is likely to be routed faster.

Unfortunately, you usually can’t just plug in the third party’s SMTP server address in the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) field of your account in Outlook. The problem here is that by default, outgoing mail is sent through port 25, and when you use this port, you must also use the ISP’s SMTP server.

Fortunately, many third-party hosts help you work around this problem by enabling you to access their SMTP server via a nonstandard port. Here are the steps to follow to configure an email account to use a nonstandard SMTP port:

1. Choose Tools, Account Settings to open the Account Settings dialog box.
2. In the E-mail tab, select the account you want to modify.
3. Click Change to open the Change E-mail Account dialog box.
4. Use the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) text box to type the domain name of the third-party host’s SMTP server.
5. Click More Settings to open the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box.
6. Click the Advanced tab.
7. In the Outgoing Server (SMTP) text box, type the port number specified by the third-party host, as shown in Figure1.


Figure 1 Change the Outgoing Server (SMTP) value to the port number used by your third-party host.

8. Click OK to return to the Change E-mail Account dialog box.
9. Click Next.
10. Click Finish.
11. Click Close.

TIP

Your ISP (or, indeed, any of your email hosts) probably implements yet another email security fea­ture called SMTP Authentication, which authenticates the sender of each message. If you find that your messages aren’t delivered or generate an error, you may need to tell Outlook that your account requires SMTP Authentication. Follow Steps 1-5 in this section to display the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box. Click the Outgoing Server tab and activate the My Outgoing Server (SMTP) Requires Authentication check box. Most SMTP authentication uses your account username and password, so leave the Use Same Settings as My Incoming Mail Server option activated. If your host uses a separate outgoing logon, activate Log On Using, instead, and fill in your User Name and Password.

Technorati Tags: different outgoing smtp, outlook 2007

Popularity: 4% [?]