Recommend an ISP that will let me send e-mails only (Outlook on a notebook)

In My Humble Opinion
1

First off, I don’t want to use a Web-based mail service. Please don’t recommend that option.

For various reasons that I’ll explain if necessary, when I travel, I use different ISP for incoming and outgoing e-mail. I’ve used Outlook Express and (full-blown) Outlook, and it’s worked fine. Until now.

For some reason (the service tech said she didn’t know why) Verizon no longer allows this sort of split. Although it worked as recently as June (my last trip), now I can’t send any outgoing messages through outgoing.verizon.net unless the incoming server is incoming.verizon.net and the displayed e-mail address is username@verizon.net.

Since I don’t use Verizon for my incoming mail, and don’t want to, I don’t want recipients to see that e-mail address. I want them to see the address for the incoming account.

(Needless to say, my incoming ISP doesn’t support this either.)

So can anyone recommend a free (or cheap) ISP that will let me send outgoing messages from a client that receives them from a different ISP’s servers?

Or suggest some other way of skinning this cat?

Thanks.

P.S. Please don’t recommend a Web-based e-mail service.

2

Are you sure it’s not a matter of configuration or login issues?

If you’re using standard email services, incoming mail should come through on a POP3 server and outgoing mail should go through on an SMTP server; each should have its own authentication scheme (if any) and one should have no bearing on the other.

That said, a lot of SMTP servers require some sort of username and password these days because of people using unprotected servers for spam. Could Verizon have enacted something similar? (Edit: According to Engadget Mobile, Verizon seems to have cut off its SMTP relay service in late August. Maybe that’s related.)

As for the address shown, would adding a reply-to address be enough? They’ll still see your other address in the “from” field, but when they reply it should go to the correct one.

Uh… as for other free SMTP servers, the only one I know of offhand is Gmail. Now, I heard you: I’m not recommending that you use Gmail, but you can sign up for a Google account and use their SMTP server through your existing client (Outlook). Would that do?

Edit: Otherwise, many low-cost webhosts (Dreamhost, for example) offer SMTP. You could sign up for a domain/account and set one up that way.

3

And here’s one more that I found on Google, but I have no experience with them. SMTP2go.com gives you outgoing mail access for $1.99 a month.

4

Thanks for the Reply.

That relay service thing may have been it. The timing is right.

I hadn’t thought about Gmail, since I assumed that you had to use its Web-based interface. I’ll look into it.

5

I’m bumping this ten-year-old thread to let Reply know that I finally took his advice of using smtp2go.com on my laptop. I never got around to trying it back in 2009, and hadn’t desperately needed a solution since then.

But I’m going on a month-long trip starting on Friday, and really wanted to get Outlook working properly on the laptop so I could have a semblance of normal work e-mailing while away from my office. I’ve had problems getting Outlook to work properly, so I had been dreading trying to make this work, and had been putting it off, and was assuming that I would probably have to live with some kind of kludge.

But, entirely coincidentally, I came across this old thread with Reply’s suggestion. I went to smtp2go.com, found that it’s still up and running (a little surprising after ten years), and setting it up was a breeze. So now it’s up and running, no problems.

Thanks, Reply!

(Have a set an SDMB record for procrastination? This is not a personal record. I took pictures of my god-daughter’s welcoming ceremony when she was a couple of days old, and gave her prints of them for her 21st birthday!)

6

Hah! Better late than never, I suppose.

Mind you, outgoing email is a lot trickier these days because all the major providers have implemented additional security measures since 2009, but it looks like SMTP2GO knows what they’re doing (at a casual glance). If it works for you, great!

Enjoy your trip, and see ya in 2029.

7

make sure that emails from that smtp server are allowed in to your important destinations. I had a situation recently where I could receive emails from my customer but could not send emails to them. Turned out I was using an obscure to them service and they had gotten some spam from them so they simply blocked all traffic from that service. Nice of them. :frowning: They grudgingly opened a hole in their firewall for me for the duration of my consulting contract.

I like to use small email services-that way I always have a current address even when I switch ISPs and don’t have to submit to Google reading all my emails. But strange things happen. Destinations let my emails in for years, then one night ban them. All I know is that I can’t send emails to my friends any more. Bummer.