A year ago I did a tutorial on how to resolve the pesky outgoing mail issues that come up when traveling with a laptop. The problem comes from the fact that many ISPs do not allow you to send email unless you use their SMTP server. This is fine if your computer does not leave home, but it is irritating if you go back and forth from home, or work, or a coffee shop or a hotel.
In this tutorial we’ll set up a GMail account and use it’s servers to send emails from Mail regardless of where you are connecting from. It should be easy to apply the same settings to Entourage but I am not covering that on this tutorial. Although I am using Tiger in this example, it is not required for it to work.
The process in my previews tutorial involved finding your ISP though Network Utility, looking up the SMTP online and then entering the new SMTP server on your mail application. It was a long process to solve the issue but at the time it was the only way I knew of. Since then a new application has come out that atomizes part of the process. WiFiSMTP finds the SMTP servers automatically. This is great in theory but I have tried at four different locations during my road trip and none of them have worked. So what do we do then? Thanks to a tip from my friend Steve, I am now sending email from any place on earth without having to do anything by using Google’s GMail services.
Step 1: Get a GMail Account
Ok, if you don’t have one already, this step might be the hardest one since Google still has GMail in beta. GMail accounts are invite only. So if you know someone who has one(wink, wink), have them send you an invitation to join.
Step 2: Set Up GMail for POP
Using your browser, login to your GMail account at gmail.com then go to the settings page by clicking on the setting link in the upper right corner of the page. From the settings page, select the Forwarding and POP tab then enable POP for all mail from the POP download section. Enabling POP allows you to use a desktop application like Mail or Entourage to check and send GMail mail but in our case, we’ll use to be able to send mail from our another account.
Step 3: Change GMail’s Sending Email Address
Go to the accounts tab and click on Add another email address then enter the email address that you would like your emails to come from. This should be an email you already have in your Mail application. Once the email address is confirmed by email, return to this same page and make that email address the default one by clicking on the make default link that corresponds to the email address you just added.
Step 3: Add GMail’s Servers to Mail
From Mail, select Mail > Preferences then select the Accounts tab.
From the accounts tab, select your account and go to the Account Information tab. From the Outgoing Mail Server(SMTP) pulldown menu, select Add Server to add the GMail server settings.

From the new window, add the following settings:
Outgoing Mail server: smtp.gmail.com
Server Port: 587
Use SSL: yes
Authentication: Password
Username: your GMail username
Password: your GMail password
Once created select the GMail server from the Outgoing Mail Server(SMTP) pulldown menu and close the preferences window.
Conclusion
This technique allows you to send email from Mail wether you are at home or at the local Starbucks without having to do anything at all. If you want to also check your GMail email from Mail, Google offers a wonderful tutorial on it.








Thank you so much for this solution.
Here’s a catch (I didn’t see it covered): When you use GMail’s SMTP servers, when you reply, it will reply directly to your gmail account. A little annoying.
Jason is right in that mail will always appear to come from the google account, but if you have the option to add a ‘reply-to’ address, then this will be used.
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