ACTION REQUIRED: Set your SMTP password

Clemens Lang cal at macports.org
Wed Nov 18 05:30:26 UTC 2020


Hi Ryan,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 10:17:29PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> Could you provide more guidance on how to do this in Apple's Mail.app
> on macOS, iOS, iPadOS?

I don't use Mail.app, so I had to check on this.

> Do we just edit our existing email account and add another SMTP server
> to the list and hope that Mail.app knows how to select the right one
> depending on the email address I select when I compose an email, or
> that it will fall back to the second SMTP server if the first one
> doesn't want to deliver the mail?

Unfortunately it seems Mail.app really isn't the most intelligent here.
You can configure multiple SMTP servers, but it will only ever use the
default one for your current account, regardless of what sender address
you are using. If your current default server rejects the email,
Mail.app offers you to choose a different SMTP server, but then makes
that SMTP server the default. This will obviously cause problems the
next time you switch sender addresses, because our SMTP only lets you
send as your address.

See also this stackoverflow post, that discusses the issue:
 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/169062/use-only-smtp-server-without-a-mailbox


> Or do we need to create an entirely new email account for the
> macports.org address, set that account to use that new SMTP server,
> and I don't know fill in garbage values for the incoming mail server
> portion?

That seems to be the way to go, unfortunately. Mail.app won't let you
fill in garbage as the incoming server, either, though. We may have to
setup an IMAP server that accepts your login data, but does not actually
give you any mail (since you don't have a mailbox on mail.macports.org).


> The Settings screen of your web app says to use "encryption: STARTTLS
> and "authentication method: AUTH PLAIN" but Mail.app doesn't refer to
> such terms. There is an "Automatically manage connection settings"
> checkbox. Should that be sufficient? If not, what should we select?

The automatic method should be sufficient. If you uncheck that box,
you'll get the option to select these mechanisms, but that shouldn't be
necessary.

-- 
Clemens


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