Weyland.be

Since a few days I got a MyForiPhone (My30) contract with Mobistar, but I ran into a problem while sending emails from my own @weyland.be email address.

It seems that Mobistar doesn’t allow SMTP connections to “external” SMTP servers while connected to their GPRS, EDGE or 3G network. The mail app on my iPhone 3GS stalls for minutes, and then fails with a standard “the connection to the SMTP server failed…”, bah.

Reading through the interwebs I found some posts of people having ran into the same problem. Some solutions described that Mobistar’s own SMTP server (smtp.mobistar.be or gprsmail.mobistar.be) must be used, but that is not really a solution. Sure, it then works when on 2G/3G, but it fails when connected to a WIFI network (be it Belgacom, Telenet or others) – Mobistar’s SMTP server only allows connections from within their IP range.

And I’m not going to switch back and forth between SMTP servers, depending on what connection I’m on.

While playing with various settings, I noticed that my Gmail accounts could send mails, no matter what connection I was on.

So there you have your solution:

• Configure your personal email account with correct SMTP server
• Configure a Gmail account
• Enable the Gmail SMTP server in your personal email account, and then disable your own SMTP server in the same account
• at Gmail.com while logged in with your Gmail account, go to “settings”, “Accounts and Import”, “send mail as:” and then “edit info”, and fill in your personal email address in “Reply-to address:”.

Et voila, a working solution without manually switching SMTP servers!