Use Mail.app with an alternate SMTP server

Mar 19, '02 10:43:33AM

Contributed by: joel

My ISP's SMTP server is only reachable to send mail when I have my TiBook at home. If I take it to work and try to send mail, my ISP's SMTP server will give me an error if I try and send mail through it. However, I found a way to send the mail via an alternate SMTP server with Mail.app. Here's how:

  1. Create a second account in the preferences dialog.
  2. Use the same email address, full name, host name, user name,
  3. Set the password field to something incorrect (like "1"). You can't leave this field blank
  4. Set the SMTP host to some mailserver at work you know you can relay through
  5. In the accounts options, enable the account but uncheck "Include this account when checking mail".
Now, when Mail.app tries to send email, it will use the account that shows up first in the preferences display to send the email. If you are at work, drag the work account to the first position in the list. If you are home, drag the home account to the first position in the list.

It's not a great solution but it gets the job done.

Note: If you give the two accounts different "email address" lines, you will get a selection box when you are editing the email to tell Mail.app which account to send the email from. In this case, however, I didn't like that so I purposefully made the email addresses on the two accounts the same.

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