Hooking Up with Shaw's New "Remote SMTP" Service

Update (February 2012 - Webmail 2.0 is completely up with all it’s Exchange goodness - so check out Shaw’s new instructions )

Please join me in welcoming Shaw’s new feature of actually allowing Shaw email users to send email while travelling without resorting to webmail or trying to find the local ISP’s SMTP server address (or seeing that Telus’ mobile SMTP server is blacklisted AGAIN marking all your email as spam). This is of course ignoring that I don’t recommend anyone actually use their ISP provided email address but instead use something a bit more dedicated like your own domain or an actual email service. It’s still better than an AOL address.

Previously I’d been setting clients up to use a Gmail account as their proxy sending address when they have a Shaw or Telus email address - this makes it easier for Shaw clients. It’s also a lot simpler than the Gmail approach (which I have yet to post here).

Coles Notes

  1. Turn on Mobile Access using the new Webmail beta: https://wmbeta.shaw.ca
  2. Change your SMTP settings to point to mail.shaw.ca using port 587, STARTTLS, and use your username and password as the authentication

More elaborate instructions

Setting Up Shaw’s End:

  1. Sign into https://wmbeta.shaw.ca
  2. Click on Preferences (right side of screen - it’s a text link beside Feedback)
  3. Click on the ‘tab’ that says ‘Mobile Access’
  4. Set it to Enabled (click the radio button beside it)
  5. You may need to change your password to meet their new security requirements.
  6. Press Save. It will say “Preferences saved” in a small yellow box at the top of the page if it’s successful.

Thunderbird:

  1. Go to the Tools menu and choose Account Settings
  2. On the left side on that window click on “Outgoing Server (SMTP)”. You may need to scroll as it’s always the last item.
  3. There should be an item associated with the Shaw account you just turned on. Whichever account you turned on Mobile Access for and click on it and then click the button that says “Edit…”
  4. In the window that appears change the server name to mail.shaw.ca instead of shawmail or shawmail.cg.shawcable.net that it was set to. The port number should be changed from 25 to 587 and the Connection Security to STARTTLS. Authentication: Normal password and then enter your username
  5. Press OK
  6. If you did not change your password when setting up Shaw then press OK and you’re done. If you did change your password when setting up Mobile Access the next time you check email it will ask you for a new password and you can enter it.

Mail.app:

  1. Go to the Preferences and click on the Accounts section
  2. Click on your Shaw account on the left side
  3. Where it says Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP): click on the drop down menu and choose “Edit SMTP Server List”.
  4. Find the Shaw SMTP server in that list and click on it.
  5. Change Server Name to mail.shaw.ca
  6. Click on the Advanced tab
  7. Check off Use Secure Sockets Layer
  8. Change the Authentication drop down menu to Password
  9. Enter your username and password and then press OK.
  10. Close the accounts preferences window and say yes to saving it if necessary.

Shaw’s already provided instructions on setting up an account anew for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices: https://wmbeta.shaw.ca/doc/offnet-device-instructions.html