NOTE: You’re going to be using Google’s service to send the email but for all intents and purposes it’s completely transparent to both you and your recipient. It’s also a world lot better than using some random SMTP server (having to find out the local one and always change it) or finding all your email you sent doesn’t even arrive in your recipient’s inbox because it’s been marked as spam because of the server used. I’d recommend looking for an IMAP host instead for the long run.
For brevity I’m leaving out the exact steps to hook this up with your favourite mail client but you can find that out fairly easily as it’s only changing the SMTP server (or check my post about setting up Shaw’s SMTP service) and change mail.shaw.ca to smtp.gmail.com and using your Google login instead of say Shaw’s in the section about changing your SMTP server).
- Set up a Google Account. If you have one you’re good to go.
- Log into Gmail
- Go to Settings (link is in the top right)
- Go to Accounts and Import
- Under “Send mail as:” section click “Send mail from another address”
- Enter your email address you want to use (eg. [email protected]) and press Next
- Choose to use Gmail’s servers, press Next and choose Send Verification
- Click on the link in the verification email. This will verify the email address so you can move onto step 9. You may need to check your Junk Mail folder.
- Back at the “Send mail as” section (you may need to refresh the browser) click the “make default” link for the email address you set up and be sure that below it “Always reply from default address” is selected.
- Now be sure to change your SMTP settings on your computer/mobile device accordingly. This varies from device to device as to the steps but is the most important step. If not set correctly (eg. not turning off other SMTP servers on an iOS device) will make everything we’ve done for naught.
- Send an email to yourself to test and reply to it and make sure it gets to the right address. The only times I’ve ever seen an error here is if the SMTP wasn’t set up correctly, step 9 wasn’t followed or the carrier’s SMTP server was enabled again (yes it’s repeated because it accounts for 99% of errors I’ve seen).
Not difficult, but something I can grab when writing an email on how to do it. :-)