Oh, man, I just solved a problem that has been horribly hounding me *for a year now*, and I just had to write about it.
At work, we use Microsoft Exchange for our email, which doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m not the calendaring / scheduling / whatever fool that cares about all the advanced crap, I just want to be able to send and receive email. I don’t get a lot here at work, and I send less, but when I do it’s always a painful experience. The reason is because I haven’t been able to get anything on my Linux desktop (I’ve been using Gentoo as my workstation OS for about 6 years now, all at different jobs, nyah!) to actually send mail out on the Exchange server, and I’ve tried everything. I can get mail just fine using POP3 or IMAP, but no SMTP love.
Anyway, I won’t go through what I tried to get working, because it didn’t work, and who cares anyway. What does work is using GMail to provide an external SMTP service. Now, the problem I anticipated, and what it does, is it munges the From: email address to force it to your GMail account name. I wanted it the email to look like [email protected] though. What I didn’t know until today is you can set that up.
Just open up the GMail interface, click on the Settings link then the “Accounts and Import” tab. There’s a section labeled “Send mail as”. Just take it from there. Add another account, and it will verify that you have access to the one you are wanting to send it from. Then, when you setup your email client (Thunderbird, in my case) to send through gmail’s SMTP server (smtp.gmail.com), and you send from [email protected], your From address will no longer be munged. Success!
Oh man, I’m so glad I don’t have to battle with Exchange any more. Or the web interface. Or my dedicated Windows box I use mostly for Outlook. *wave of relief* 🙂
The only complaint I’ve had about doing that is gmail adds a “Sender: [email protected]” header to those emails. Which some email clients will show. And I usually don’t want people I’m emailing with my work email to be able to find out my personal gmail address.
Yah, I’m actually considering setting up a second gmail account just to get around that.
Gmail and Thunderbird, and Google Calendars, and Lightning, and Google Provider for Calendars make a really slick integrated calendaring and collaboration system. My wife and I love it.
Another possibility is your ISP. Usually you can get smtp access via your account with them and generally speaking they don’t mangle anything (ie comcast, etc).