Laptop mail server
13th March 2003 by Simon
I’ve been moving around lots of different Internet connections for a while (home DSL, work DSL, friends DSL or many different WiFi connections) and this all normally works really well, except for sending mail from my laptops mail client.
Most ISP’s (rightly) restrict usage of their outgoing/sending mail servers (SMTP) to their own customers to prevent spammers sending out their pollution. They do this by checking that your machines IP address is from their network, ie you’ve accessed from one of their connections. If you try to send mail from another network to their mail server, you may get a message telling you that they do not reply. In a world where you never use any connection other than just your own home or work connection this is fine, but as we know, this isn’t the future.
For the mobile email user, there are a number of ways around this including
- changing your outgoing email server every time you change connection - a pain as you need to find out the address of each ISP
- use an open mail relay - dangerous as most of these are on blacklists and your mail may get refused by the server you are trying to send to
- run your own email server - this is usually quite protracted
I’ve been intending to solve this problem for a while and finally found the time to do it today. After a large amount of searching for, installing and testing SMTP server that run on Windows PC’s, I’ve settled on the ArGoSoft Mail Server as it’s pretty small, loads silently on bootup, has full logging, security built into it - _and_ they give away a free version [there are also versions that you can pay for that provide lots of extra functionality]. It installed smoothly, configuring was a snip and thus far I’ve been impressed with its performance.
So, recommended, but check back to see if it stays like that, I’ll post any problems.
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A question arrived from Wiggy Green
The fixed IP address you mention - is that in your mail client? If so, when the ArGoSoft mail server installs, you can specify its IP address - I set mine to 127.0.0.1. This is the address you set into your mail client as outgoing (SMTP) mail server. When you’ve done this, you’ll be able to send mail from any network.
BTW - as an extra level of protection against other potentially using the mail server on my machine as an open rely, I enabled SMTP authentication in ArGoSoft. You’ll need to add this username and password to your mail client as well.
Hope this helps.
Just wanted to say thanks, I also am mobile between 11 sites, and 7 isp’s, your link helped me greatly.