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I work from home and use an email client for all my work email. Up until yesterday, I was able to use my ISPs SMTP server (Verizon FiOS) to send my work-related email with any from-address I liked as long as I was authenticated with my FiOS account info.

Verizon now transitioned everyone to AOL for email service and the AOL SMTP server blocks email from sender-addresses that don't match the account address. Needless to say I can't send my work email using a personal sender-address.

Unfortunately my domain name provider does not offer me SMTP access for my work domains either. And to make things even more fun, Verizon blocks outgoing connections to port 25.

Is there any (preferably free but reputable) way to get things working?

Here are things I've looked into, but haven't been able to make work:

  1. Use smtp.gmail.com
    Supposedly this used to work, but then they started rewriting the sender address to match the address of the gmail account.
  2. Use smtp-relay.gmail.com
    This might work, but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what I need to do here. Do I need some kind of Google Apps account for this?
  3. Run my own SMTP server (e.g. exim4)
    The blocked port 25 makes this a bit hard. Is it possible to make it work anyways? For example by using port 587 instead? Or requiring all outgoing SMTP connections to be encrypted (and then using port 465)? Somehow the only info I can find is how to encrypt incoming connections, but not outgoing ones.
  4. Use bluehost.com
    I have a web-hosting account at bluehost.com that provides me with an SMTP server, that even allows me to do relaying. For some strange reason, though, if I send mail through it, the messages get a red flag attached to it in gmail saying "Gmail could not verify that <sender-address> actually sent this message (and not a spammer)." and "bluehost.com did not encrypt this message".
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  • you can run your own smtp server on whatever port you want. And another way is you can SSH to a machine where you have more freedom, make it an SSH tunnel with forwarding, then you can make connections through the SSH tunnel that get forwarded to wherever you want. So you'd just connect your SMTP client to 127.0.0.1:542 or whatever port. And it'd forward to wherever you specified when you made the ssh tunnel. Alternatively you could just connecting your SMTP client to 5.3.3.2:2456 e.g. wherever you smtp server is or whatever forwards to it.
    – barlop
    Mar 10, 2016 at 22:18
  • @barlop The problem with running my own SMTP server is that the outgoing port 25 is blocked. So, while I have no problem connecting to my SMTP server with my email client and handing it the mails, the SMTP server is not able to forward these mails to their respective final destinations as those servers all expect to be called on port 25. You are correct, though, that I could simply run my SMTP server on a different system where I have more freedom, but unfortunately I don't have access to such a server at the moment...
    – Markus A.
    Mar 10, 2016 at 22:30
  • you don't have access to any computer where the ISP doesn't block port 25? (if you did you could run a virtual machine running debian and run postfix - an smtp server).
    – barlop
    Mar 10, 2016 at 22:43
  • @barlop All such systems cost money, unfortunately... For my business I use Google AppEngine for hosting which doesn't provide me with any virtual machines either, unless I pay extra for ComputeEngine access...
    – Markus A.
    Mar 10, 2016 at 22:52
  • when I mentioned the virtual machine i had in mind something you set up at home if you had a decent ISP that doesn't block port 25. Or a plain linux machine. But if it's not a home thing.. You don't need as much as a virtual server or your own linux machine. Alternatively, maybe there are really cheap shell accounts your requirements are quite small. Maybe if you enquired on other technical forums some may run such servers you hardly need any processing power or hard drive space from them. They may already have a postfix server you can use.
    – barlop
    Mar 11, 2016 at 1:04

1 Answer 1

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I'm in the same boat with Verizon and my personal domains. I tried gmail's relay, but they rename the from to your default address in Gmail which doesn't work for me. I did wind up finding a free option if you send less than 201 emails per day: http://www.serversmtp.com/en the account setup takes a bit and you have to pretend like you're a business (I just said consulting) but it's been working for the last couple days. Finally back to normal. Damn you Verizon.

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  • Pointing out in 2020 that the end of their TOS says that, "Free plans expire after one year from activation date. Free plans can’t be renewed." serversmtp.com/terms-and-conditions
    – Daniel R. Collins
    Aug 5, 2020 at 19:26
  • And: Your registration may be denied (perhaps if company check fails?), as it was for me.
    – Daniel R. Collins
    Aug 5, 2020 at 20:42

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