In most email applications, it is possible to directly specify a separate username/password pair for authentication for the outgoing SMTP mail. If your ISP requires such authentication, you can configure it quite easily.

However, some email applications, most notably Eudora, do not have an easy way to allow a different username/password pair for outgoing mail authentication. The reason this is a problem when you are using ChoiceMail is because your ChoiceMail username is normally not a simple sequence of characters but rather a combination of a username followed by an email address. For example, suppose that before you install ChoiceMail, you have the following settings for configuring your email client.

• Email address: john@smith.com
• Username: foo
• Password: xyz
• POP3 (incoming mail) server: pop.someisp.com
• SMTP (outgoing mail) server: smtp.someisp.com

Typically you will configure ChoiceMail so that your ChoiceMail username begins with the same username as you had for your email client account. So, after your email application has been configured to communicate with ChoiceMail, the settings in your email client will be as follows:

• Email address: john@smith.com
• Username: foo/john@smith.com
• Password: xyz
• POP3 (incoming mail) server: localhost
• SMTP (outgoing mail) server: localhost

Note that the username is now a combination of your original username followed by a slash and then your email address. If you had more than one email address, the usernames in your email client would all be of the form

foo/xxx
foo/yyy
foo/zzz

where 'foo' is the ChoiceMail username and xxx,yyy, and zzz represent your different email addresses.

However, if your real ISP's mail server requires authentication for outgoing messages, it will expect to see the username and password foo and xyz respectively. This will work fine if you can get your email client to use a separate username and password for outgoing authentication. However, Eudora personalities have a checkbox called "Use SMTP authentication" but they assume that the username and password will be the same as your POP3 username and password. This of course is not the case once you're using ChoiceMail because your POP3 username has been extended as described above.

Fundamentally the problem occurs because Eudora does not have settings in personalities to allow the POP3 username/passwords and the SMTP username/passwords to be different. And because the POP3 username is configured to connect to ChoiceMail using the "cmusername/email address" notation, that username does not work for outgoing authentication.

Eudora 6.x provides a workaround solution for this problem. What you have to do is to configure a new personality to be a relay personality and you set up that relay personality so that it uses authentication. You then set your MAIN personality so that it uses the relay personality for OUTGOING messages.

So essentially what you do is to create a new personality with the POP3 username/password configured for your real ISP (not ChoiceMail) and enable authentication for outgoing messages in that new personality. You must then DISABLE "check for mail" for that personality because you're only using it for outgoing messages and you don't want it to actually pull in any email.

Then, when your main personality wants to send mail, it will connect through the relay personality which will then use the POP3 settings for outgoing authentication. It's a real HACK on the part of the Eudora design but it works.

More information on this is available in the Eudora documentation.