The business workplace is changing. More and more business professionals are working from home and the workplace has transformed into a mobile reality. Broadband has been the catalyst and Internet Service Providers have become big players in the marketplace as a consequence.
If this is true, why do these same companies enforce their customers (us) to use their outgoing mail servers?
If you don’t know what I mean, then I’ll try to explain. If I am using a mail client such as Microsoft Outlook to send mail, my outgoing mail server is set as mail.pctechnix.ie. Eircom for example, has no problem with this. Slap yourself on the back Eircom.
Other Irish Broadband Providers are not so straightforward. Irish Broadband will only allow you to use smtp.irishbroadband.ie and NTL enforce smtp.upcmail.ie. Perlico also have a confusing list of ones you can use. There are more providers that can be added to the guilty list but I’d like to stick to my main point.
These settings will not mean much to most residential users (once they find the settings), especially if their pc remains homebound, but the mobile user has a headache in store. If you take your laptop which has been configured to send mail using one broadband provider and move to another location with broadband provided by another (who enforces their outgoing mail server) then you will have to modify your settings every single time.
I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I don’t understand why they do this. Possibly there’s a valid reason for it? Maybe I’ll delete this post in embarrassment of my own ignorance but this in general does not bode well if you plan on taking your laptop on a road trip.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Hi,
ISPs don’t’ force you to use their Outgoing mail servers. They provide access to a free outgoing mail server for customers connected to their network.
If you try to connect to their outgoing mail server from another network (eg. use Irish BB to access NTL mail server) they won’t allow that. This is to stop Spam and abuse of their mail servers from outside their network (and hence out of their control).
Some email service provides (Eg Gmail) allow you to use their outgoing mail server with authentication, so you can send mail from any network. This authentication is usually the same as you incoming mail username and password.
See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=76147 for a guide on how Gmail does it.
I would imagine mail.pctechnix.ie has a similar service.
It’s fairly straight forward to set up and removes the need to change your outgoing mail server when you’re on the move.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Hi, i understand what you are saying but Irish Broadband for example, would not allow mail.pctechnix.ie even with authentication for the outgoing mail server. I’ve tried that and asked them to provide settings as in the case like Gmail where you have to alter ports, etc but it doesn’t look possible. They may have these settings somewhere but i’ve been at a loss to find them.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I would guess there is a problem with how mail.pctechnix.ie is setup. If you had something like telnet handy you could check to see how connections to it are handled. Google access mail server via telnet.
Paul
July 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I know for a fact, that Irish Broadband do not “force” you to use their outgoing mail servers.
They recommend it, for various reasons, but there is no policy in place preventing you from using an SMTP server that is outside of their network.
July 9th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
They may not anymore, and may have recently changed this but I can say without a single doubt that this was not the case at least 12 months ago when I was on a clients site. We had tried absolutely everything in terms of outgoing mail settings and we were told by their technical support that there was no option but to use their outgoing mail server settings.