Using Gmail as your SMTP server When Using your ISP's Email

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).

  1. Set up a Google Account. If you have one you’re good to go.
  2. Log into Gmail
  3. Go to Settings (link is in the top right)
  4. Go to Accounts and Import
  5. Under “Send mail as:” section click “Send mail from another address”
  6. Enter your email address you want to use (eg. [email protected]) and press Next
  7. Choose to use Gmail’s servers, press Next and choose Send Verification
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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. :-)

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