People send a lot of emails on a daily basis and many of them have no idea of the mechanism behind these services. they don’t know how messages are sent and received, or what is the role of the servers behind them.
Even if it takes a few seconds to send an email from one device to another, there’s a lot we don’t know about the process. Every email we write and send goes through servers.
Since gmail is the most used email account by people, I suggest we take a look at its services.
services for sending and receiving emails from gmail are classified into:
- google incoming email imap and pop: gmail.com (ssl enabled, port 995).
- google outgoing email smtp: gmail.com ( ssl enabled, port 465).
what is an outgoing mail server?
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a set of standardized rules or protocols for sending and receiving email over the Internet. A device that handles smtp is called a mail server and preferably has nearly continuous uptime.
the smtp mail server can send and receive mail, while at the client level smtp is connected to an outgoing mail server and the post office protocol 3 (pop3) with incoming mail.
Email clients need an address for the outgoing email server and the incoming or pop3 server together and send mail. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide these addresses to customers when a subscription or contract is approved, and mail server addresses are also often listed on the ISP’s site.
In some situations, both outgoing and incoming mail will be handled by a single server, such as mail.[yourisp].com; however, often the outgoing email server address looks like smtp.[yourisp].com, and the incoming address looks like pop3.[yourisp].com >.
To gain access to an outgoing email server, users are required to authenticate with a username and password associated with the client’s isp account. In this way, the ISP is protected from handling outgoing emails created by non-customers, which could quickly affect their resources.
In addition, server administration can monitor activity on your outgoing email server through authentication to prevent malicious activity such as fraud or spam.
As soon as mail is sent to an outgoing email server, the associated SMTP server examines the email headers to transmit the message to its destination.
then, communication begins between it and the next mail server along the circuit. communication is like a set of requests and responses, which moves the mail to its final destination. mail can move through several transition hosts before reaching the host that serves as the recipient’s incoming mail server.
a web-based email service runs its mail servers which function like an isp’s mail servers, except that users log on to the website to read, write, and send mail, rather than to open a personal email client from the desktop.
for example, gmail is so popular because it allows you to access email from any device that has an internet connection. it also prevents virus-laden mail from being downloaded to your personal hard drive, since the mail comes from the website’s server.
For protection reasons, the email server uses a pop3 protocol, so make sure your email program supports an encrypted ssl connection before you start configuring your incoming and outgoing servers.
outgoing mail server for gmail configuration.
It is not complicated to configure the outgoing mail server for gmail and use it to send and deliver emails.
First of all, you should know that the outgoing mail server for gmail has some stringent mail sending limits to deter unwanted actors from using it. So you will be able to handle about a hundred recipients at the same time and 500 messages every day, but if you do more than that, google will restrict your account.
You should invest in a professional smtp server to send newsletters or multiple emails.
To configure your gmail server, open your email settings in heimdal email security (or other email client product you may be using) and enter these settings for gmail:
- server name: smtp.gmail.com
- port: 465 (ssl) / 587 (tls)
- sender email address: your email address
- test email address: email address to receive test emails.
- email type: smtp / smtps
- enable tls: yes / no . if you choose no, ssl will be set as default.
- you need to enable authentication to set up a gmail account
- username: specify your email address
- password: specify your password
and ready! 😊
It is essential to be aware of the fact that from the outgoing email server to the multiple relay hosts and the last incoming mail server, email is less confidential than a message sent by regular mail.
Encrypted emails are considered personal as they are encrypted in an unreadable way before sending and decrypted by the recipient upon receipt.