Wagging the Dog(Bark)
sniffing around the Internet

Samuel’s post about email aliases got me thinking about my own email habits. My main computer is a Powerbook, both for work and home, and I spend a lot of time out-and-about, working from various coffee houses around town. Of course, most of them have free wi-fi, so I can talk with the other guys in the office, blog, check email, etc.There are a few tricks I use to be able to email from pretty much anywhere:

• First, I use Apple’s Mail program, often called Mail.app. The cool thing about Mail.app is that if the default SMTP server for an account is unavailable, it will automatically offer to use another server. I keep about 10 or so common SMTP servers set up in my Mail.app, and about 80% of the time I can find the one that the ISP for the coffee house uses.
• If one of my presets isn’t available, and I feel like doing a little digging, I’ll use two tools: the ipcheck page at DogBark, and the Network Utility that’s part of Apple OS X. The ipcheck page tells me what my current public IP address is (and thus, the IP address of the wifi router I’m using), and I can look that IP address up using WHOIS in Network Utilities to see who the provider is. You’ll want to use the whois.arin.net server for this lookup. Once I know who is providing the connection, I can either try some common server names (mail., smtp., outgoing., etc.), or I can hit their home page to see if they have an email configuration how-to.
• If I’m still not able to send mail, I’ll use our webmail interface. Not as convenient, but it gets me there.

Two things I also use, but didn’t think fit into the list above:

• My Treo 650. I use ChatterEmail, even if I don’t have my Powerbook with me. It’s a great tool, and the Chatter client is much better than the stock Versamail client.
• .Mac. I just signed up for a .Mac account - I know, I’m quite behind - and the great thing about their service is that they also provide secure SMTP. Personally, I think that’s a pretty big risk on their part, but I’m glad to use their service!

So, head down to your local coffee house - notice, I said “local”, not “monolithic corporate behemoth that burns their beans” - grab a good cup of java, and keep in touch!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.