Almost Perfect Gmail

Earlier this week I thought I had hit upon a neat way of being able to send emails from outlook no matter where I was, no matter which email account I used. If only it was true.

Two things happened:

Google isn't as friendly with their SMTP server as Earthlink was. They insist on putting xxxx@gmail.com as the sender ("Return-Path" in the email header) of the email while Earthlink used the "User Information" field in Outlook as the Return-Path, which of course you can set to any email address. The result is that using Gmail's SMTP, emails look like they come from a Gmail account, while using Earthlink's SMTP server, they look as though they come from my "native email address", which they do. Pity... I might have to check out one of those commercial SMTP services after all.

The other thing that happened was that I was at a company which blocks port 465, which is what Gmail uses for its authenticated SMTP. I guess they don't want their staff to use Gmail at work...

I continue to have my mail server forward email to Gmail and "pop" Gmail with Outlook. That way Gmail does my spam detection and inward archiving on the way to my inbox. It would have been nice to archive the sent mail as well. Mrs Gmail... please!

[update: I took the plung with authsmtp.com]