SMTP woes

I've recently enjoyed a holiday in France and frighteningly one of the first questions I asked my Brother who booked the house was about Internet availability. He had already asked and Wifi was available in the house. It meant my hands could stop shaking with the stress of possibly being disconnected for 2 weeks. Well in reality my Vodafone dongle would have taken a hammering.

We rocked up to the house (beautiful place by the way) and 20 minutes after unpacking the cars there were 2 MacBook Pros glowing silently on the dining room table. In fact we had 3 notebooks between us as I had also taken my Asus EEE as mentioned in the previous post. Sad eh, but even my wife doesn't moan anymore as long as emails are answered, blogs are written etc at appropriate times.

In fact the laptops came in useful on a number of occasions, looking up the weather, finding a local Kart track, finding a good restaurant and route finding to a Chateaux. Even the parents and in-laws were on board.

Later that day a number of emails arrived but as I've found with a number of ISP's my normal SMTP details were blocked. There are a bunch of ways around this but for your information I used http://whatismyip.com to get the IP address assigned to the router, next I did a look up on SamSpade to find out who owned the IP. This turned out to be France Telecom i.e. Orange, a quick Google search found the details smtp.orange.fr which then worked perfectly with no authentication.

If you travel alot there is a paid option of www.smtp.com, for about $10 a month for 50 emails a day you can send emails through any ISP without the hassle of changing details.

You can of course just switch to webmail but I like my Mac Mail.

As an aside I cracked the WEP code on the house's router in 4 minutes 37 seconds - AAAAAAAAAAAAAFFFFFFFFFFFFF. I love my EEE!