How to send .Mac mail when SMTP is blocked

Jan 18, '06 06:34:00AM

Contributed by: gconway

If you travel, or use your laptop at wireless hot spots, you've probably discovered that even though you can read your .Mac email using Apple Mail, many of these providers block access to SMTP, forcing you to send your messages through web mail rather than the Mail app itself. Some people probably find this more secure, and it is, but I'm a creature of habit, and I've got Mail set up with various handy filters that sort my messages and trash spam, etc., which makes it far more convenient to do my mail reading and replying within Mail itself.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, lots of providers block SMTP, so replying to messages within Mail results in an error. Here's the trick I've discovered to allow sending mail through Mail -- save your email as a Draft, then log onto the .Mac website and complete the sending from there. If you have several messages to send, save them all as Drafts. It's rather strange behavior, when you think about it, that a provider will block access to SMTP, but allow you to upload your drafts to your mail server. But they do. And for someone who's a creature of habit like I am, it's a simple solution to an annoying problem.

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