Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

CHAPTER 11 MAIL, ADDRESS BOOK, AND iCAL 211
NOTE Almost all outgoing servers will be Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) servers. SMTP
is what makes e-mail work by moving your message from SMTP server to SMTP server until
your message reaches its destination. Unfortunately, as the name implies, it is very simple and
very old. It was written for a day long ago when the Internet, and e-mail, was used mainly by
educational, government, and research institutions. Spam wasn’t a problem. Today, most
SMTP servers have evolved to provide some checks in an attempt to limit spam, but the fundamental
design of SMTP is to accept and route all e-mail as quickly and effortlessly as
possible. As such, spam gets through. This presents some issues for nonspammers (well spammers
too, but we don’t care about issues they have). Certain public Internet connections
routinely block SMTP traffic, so if you find yourself attempting to send an e-mail from a public
place or even from work or a hotel room, you may find it doesn’t work. In some cases, there is
a special SMTP server you can gain access to (Mail will present you with the opportunity to
change or add an SMTP server when it fails to connect to the default SMTP server tied with a
particular account); other times, it’s just not going to work. About the only real solution I’ve
found in some of these situations is to send my message through a web mail interface.
Just like when you configure your incoming account, when you enter new outgoing account
information, Mail will attempt to contact the server to acquire additional information about the
server and to verify the connection when you click the Continue button. If Mail can’t connect to
the server, you will get a warning asking whether you’d like to continue. After you click Continue,
you may or may not get the Security Options screen to set up a secure connection for
outgoing mail. Unlike incoming mail, a secure connection is recommended only if your SMTP
server requires authentication. You really want to keep your authentication encrypted. As for
your message, it’s going to eventually be passed around from SMTP server to SMTP server with
no encryption anyway.
NOTE If you want to encrypt a mail message, a number of utilities can allow this, each with its
own pros and cons. One of the most popular is Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption. This is a
public key encryption system that is widely distributed. In this system, each user has a private
key and a public key. Any information encrypted using the public key can be decrypted using
only the private key. Commercial versions (www.pgp.com) and open source variations based on
OpenPGP are available.
Upon completion of entering your outgoing mail information, you will be presented with a
summary of your new account information (Figure 11-5). If everything is correct, hit the Create
button to create your new account.
Figure 11-5. Preview your e-mail account information, and hit Create to create your new account.