Send email on campus through BYU’s SMTP server

Have you ever tried to send email while on campus, only to find that you can’t? The reason for this is because of recent security restrictions by OIT. In an effort to curb the amount of viruses being spread around campus, BYU has restricted all outgoing SMPT traffic to their SMTP server. The following article describes how to configure your mail client to use their server.

SMTP is outbound email. Most internet service providers and email account providers will provide you with an address to an SMTP server to use. Many ISPs, networks, and corporations however restrict you to using their SMTP servers while within their networks. Although this is not the best solution, it is a temporary solution that does reduce the amount of spam and viruses that are spread across the internet. BYU implimented this restriction as a temporary solution while they investigate and develope a more appropriate solution.

Using Apple Mail, you can set up many SMTP servers to use for each of your email accounts…

Each account has a default SMTP server associated with it. If you are nearly always on campus, we would recommend setting BYU’s SMTP server as the default for all of your email accounts…

If you are only on campus ocassionally, you can leave your own SMTP server set, and then Mail will prompt you after attempting to send a message to either try again later or use an alternate server…

In this case, we can select “mail.byu.edu” or “email.byu.edu” if they have already been added to our list of servers. This will then use the alternate server for temporarily without chaning your settings.

Most email providers will allow you to send email from within their nework without authenticating. This is true for BYU’s network. So, if you are only going to use BYU’s SMTP server from on campus, changing to or setting up their SMTP server is all you will need to do. If you wish to use their server from off campus, you will need to authenticate.

To authenticate, you must first set up a BYU email password. This is a seperate password from your Route Y password and must be different. To do this:

1. Log on to Route Y
2. Click the “Preview: Post Office v3″ Link
3. Click the “Chg Password” box at the top of the page
4. Enter your password and click Submit

Now, you’re ready to configure Mail. To add BYU’s SMTP servers…

1. Open Mail Preferences, select “Accounts”, then click the “Account Information” tab. Select an account from the list on the left
2. Select “Add Server…” from the outgoing mail server pop-up menu. This will bring up the “SMTP Server Options” dialogue.

If you do not want to authenticate, then all you need is the server address…

• Server is “email.byu.edu” or “mail.byu.edu”

…otherwise, enter the rest of your credentials…

• Port is 25; Don’t use SSL
• Authentication is Password
• User Name is your NetID
• Password is the e-mail password that you set above

You’re ready to go! Just select this server you’ve now created whenever you need to send email on campus, and your regular server when off.

Did you know that you can also receive your BYU email through mail (ie: BYU offers POP access)? Just create a new account in Mail. The settings for incoming mail are the same as those for outgoing. For more details on setting up BYU email in Mail, see the article “Setting up BYU email in Apple Mail”.

NOTE: Article enhancements in italics, by BYU MUG administration.