Getting Email Working on My Droid

Anyone who I have talked to in the last two weeks has heard me complain about the wonkiness of the non-Gmail app on my Droid. It was terrible - sometimes it would update and download email properly, sometimes it would not. Sometimes I had to power the phone off and back on to get it to start downloading the email properly.

I talked to a friend last night who is a long-time Android user and he said that he had always set up his email as IMAP. So I tried that and it worked! Hallelujah!

However sending email properly was not quite as easy. My work server apparently won't relay email from outside the network without a complex series of security settings which my phone doesn't have the sophistication to mimic.

So I tried to send my work email through my personal mail server. The server is smart enough to see that the "from" email address doesn't match the domain so it rejects it, or more specifically doesn't relay it at all.

So then I try to send through my Gmail account, which has worked well for other accounts in the past. The mail goes through, but Gmail changes the from, so instead of saying from "me@myjob.com," it says "from me@gmail.com."

I spent an hour wrestling with this last night, and I got one email through properly. Backtracking from that email I worked out a relatively simple hack. I have at least a half dozen Gmail accounts, and tried sending through all of them. The one that works has my "from" address at work set up as an identity. Thus Gmail does not change the address!

After two weeks I almost have my email working, with the exception that I dislike IMAP. But at least I can now reliably check my email. Not as easily as I would like but it works!

To recap, if you are having difficulty relaying your email through an SMTP server from an Android phone:

1. Set it to use your Gmail account as an SMTP (smtp.gmail.com, TLS security)
2. Make sure that the Gmail account you are using as login credentials has the email you want to send from set up as an identity.