Just thought I would put down how I solved the problem with sending email from multiple accounts on the same server yesterday.
First a description of the problem I was faced with.
A client wanted to hook up several email accounts to the same email client. Nothing strange with that, it happens every day. What maybe was a little unique in this case was that some of the email accounts resided on the same server.
I like to believe that the most common situation is that people tie different email accounts from different ISP’s together, and doing that, chances are that they never encounter this problem. Anyhow, I searched Google extensively, and not one of the hits addressed this problem.
My client used a MacBook Air with Lion installed. And the application used is Mail 5, perhaps not one of the best applications that Apple have released. Let’s hope it will develop.
When all the different email accounts was set up, they all recieved email properly, but only the account that was set up first could send something. Emails from all the other email accounts got stuck when trying to send, forward or reply.
So what was the solution to this problem?
Send, forward and reply all make use of the SMTP servers. And what maybe isn’t obvious when you use different email accounts on the same server, is that you need to authorize to the SMTP (sending) server witht the same account that your IMAP or POP (recieveing) functionality is using. That gives, you have to create an SMTP entry that matches your IMAP (or POP) entry. So for every recieving email account you have to create an sending account too.
This paired with some issues in the setup wizards on Apples email client does not give you a logical and straight forward setup. I had to go through the settings over and over again. Filling in the same passwords time after time. The little invention “show password” that android makes use of would have been very handy here. Given how stubborn this setup was, I can almoust swear that the setup wizard mixes accounts and passwords, and that you have to go in and straight this up later.
Well, now it works like a charm.
The different email accounts recieve and send flawlessly. And I have learned to keep a one-to-one relatioship between incoming and outgoing email accounts.
