Many people have problems sending email reliably from their iPhone or other mobile devices. Receiving mail is usually not a problem, but sometimes, you can’t send mail. Mail accounts at the major players, such as gmail or me.com are usually not affected, but if you have an email account from a hosting provider, or small business, you likely have seen this problem. A common symptom would be that you can send email when you are at home, connected to your home WiFi network, but can’t always send when you are on the road.
There are two problems here. First, because of the spam problem, most mail servers will no longer accept mail from just any source. For example, the RoadRunner mail servers will accept mail only if you are connected via their network. You may be a customer, but if you are connecting via, say, AT&T’s network, they will not accept your attempt to send mail.
The other problem, also due to the curse of spam, is that some ISPs are blocking port 25 which is usually used to send mail. That stops spammers from originating spam from the ISP’s network. It also prevents legitimate users from sending mail via any but the ISP’s own email servers.
The usual advice offered is to use web-based mail clients. This does work, but is less intuitive and less convenient than using dedicated mail software. Some users may also resort to sending mail from another email address that is working, even though they would prefer to use a different account. There is a better way, so keep reading.
If AT&T set up your iPhone for you, they may have configured your account to send mail via their own mail server cwmx.com. AT&T does this to help overcome this problem and prevent customer complaints. The name cwmx is from AT&T’s alter ego, Cingular Wireless, thus stands for Cingular Wireless Mail eXchange. This will work fine as long as you are sending via AT&T’s own network. However, it may or may not work when you are connected via WiFi.
The solution to both problems is fully authenticated mail servers, where the client connects via a secure protocol, and authenticates using a username and password, or other mechanism. Then, the mail server knows that you are who you say you are, and are not some random spammer. If the provider of your email account allows authenticated connections, then great, you should configure your mail software to use them, and your problems should be over. Unfortunately, authenticated mail servers are still rare, and many providers do not offer them yet. Usually they will beat around the bush, but never come right out and say they don’t support authenticated mail connections.
This problem is common enough, and annoying enough that some companies offer services just to fix it. For $2 per month, you can get an account with AUTHSMTP.com, which will allow you to use their mail servers as a relay to send mail from your own preferred email account.
However, there is still another way. If you have a (free) Google mail account (gmail), you can use Google’s mail servers to relay your email to the server of your choice. Google is really leading the way in this area. Just today (14 Jan 2010), Google made all webmail sessions automatically fully secure, in that they always use the SSL protocol to authenticate and protect your session from snooping.
Google actually sanctions this mail relay arrangement, and even provides instructions on how to do it. Here are Google’s instructions:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370
The only drawback to this is that it may also display your gmail address to the recipient as well as the 3rd part email address you are sending from in the form of
yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com
I think most recipients will never see this, and if they do, they will get over it.
When setting this up in your mail client, it can be confusing. Remember that for your outgoing mail server, you must use the gmail server, and your gmail username and password to get you into that server, but your incoming mail server still uses the credentials of your original mail account.
Most of this discussion applies equally well to laptops and other mobile email readers. I have tried this on an iPhone though, and know it will work.
-Jamie Cox
