Using Gmail authenticated SMTP on other email accounts

Many networks are set up to make it impossible to send emails when your mail server is not on the same network (they block port 25). As a frequent traveller and itinerant, this was a real pain for some time. The usual recommended option is to change your email client (outlook in my case) to use a local mailserver, which is painful to have to do regularly. For a while I created different profiles for every network I used, but that was still a right nuisance.

Then I noticed that Earthlink, who I was my ISP while in the USA, implemented "Authenticated SMTP", which allowed me to use their mail server, no matter which network I was on. And because there is no reason why you can't use different mail servers to send and receive, I simpliy reconfigured all my other accounts to use Earthlink's SMTP.

Recently, I've been looking for alternatives to Earthlink, why pay $20 per month just to use their SMTP server? A number of suppliers will allow you to use their authenticated SMTP server for an annual fee (check the sponsored links on this search). I was about to pay up when I realised that Google's free email service, Gmail, uses Authenticated SMTP. Why pay if it's available for free? So I edited my settings in Outlook to use Google's SMTP settings for sending "from" all of my email accounts in three easy steps.

The first step:

Enter "smtp.gmail.com" in the Outgoing Mail Server field

The second step:

Click "more settings" and then on the outgoing server tab. Check "My Outgoing server etc." and click "log on using", then enter the user name and password of the gmail account.

The third step:

Check "This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)" for the Outgoing server (SMTP) and enter 465 in the box.

That's it (read Google's set up page for more detailed instructions)
[Update: I spent hours figuring out how I could cleanly send a copy of all my sent (outlook) emails to Gmail. I have come to like their way of archiving. I just noticed that when you use GMail's SMTP server it also stores the email. Doh... Gmail rocks!]

[Later: It is not as perfect as I had hoped, see post]

[ Latest: I paid for a commercial SMTP service, see post]