Solving the Problem with an SMTP Relay

Sending emails when traveling can be a real pain. That's because many email systems now block users from outside their physical network to protect the network from junk email, phishing schemes and similar unpleasantness.

That's great, but it can cause headaches when you are trying to send and receive email on the road.

Receiving messages will work fine, because there's little risk to allowing people to receive messages.

But you will often find that you can't send messages because your usual SMTP server doesn't want to talk to you. The SMTP server is the computer that takes messages you want to send, and forwards them to the recipients you specified.

If you can't connect to an SMTP server, you can't send email.

How to Handle the Problem

People have come up with a few different approaches to dealing with this problem. One is to send messages using a web-based email account like Hotmail or Gmail. That way you can be sure your messages will go out. But then you've got to keep switching back and forth between different email accounts depending on where you are.

Plus the people you are corresponding with have to know that when they send mail to bob.smith@xyzcorp.com, they might get a message back from sexylegs@hotmail.com! Not good.

Another approach is to use the SMTP server of whichever network you are on right now. This could work if you spend your time in a limited number of locations, and you don't mind setting up different email profiles that you use depending on where you are.

But finding the outgoing mail SMTP port information at each location can be a headache. And of course this is totally impractical if you are moving all over the place. You're not going to have much luck asking the guy at the front desk of some hotel for their SMTP Port 25 settings!

A Better Approach

A better approach for anyone who travels a lot (or just doesn't want the headaches when they do travel) is to use an SMTP relay. This is an SMTP mail server that isn't attached to one particular network and allows you to connect to it when you want to send email.

To use an SMTP relay, you create an account with the company that runs the service, then enter their information into your email program instead of the information about your usual SMTP server. After you do that, your email program sends all your mail through the SMTP relay server, eliminating any issues of where you are connecting from.

Choosing an SMTP Relay Service

You can find several companies that provide this kind of relay service. You'll of course want one that doesn't charge an arm and a leg, but that isn't the only consideration.

You want the service to support multiple email accounts. After all, you'll want to be able to send work emails using your work email address (or addresses), and personal emails using your personal address (or addresses), right?

Finally, you want to deal with a company that's been around for a while and has a lot of experience (and customers). That way you can be confident that your SMTP relay server will be up and running when you need to use it.

Although there are other options, I recommend you check out SMTP2Go.com:

The company was established in 2006 and has over 6,000 corporate and individual customers in over 100 countries.

They support up to 5 different email addresses for an individual account and an unlimited number for corporate accounts.

They provide detailed instructions for most popular email programs (including, of course, Outlook) so you can be up and running in minutes.

Their pricing is very reasonable.

Several Living With Outlook readers are now using SMTP2Go as their SMTP relay, and I've yet to receive a single report of problems.

Check out SMTP2go.com now.

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