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Josh.biz Technical Note 7 - added April 2008

Settings for sending emails from a non-AOL email address through AOL

As a web designer, I have a few clients who use AOL as their internet service provider and need to send emails from non-AOL email addresses. As with BT, this has become slightly complicated recently as large ISP companies seek to prevent spam being sent via their servers.

Unfortunately, the work arounds seem to keep changing and their support centres view this as an 'advanced' subject area which they often can't offer assistance with. Some support technicians at AOL fail to even grasp the problem and others have explained that sending non-AOL emails via AOL can't be done. This is absolute rubbish.

It can be done. And let's face it, there are always going to be plenty of AOL users out there who might be self employed, working from home or just running a hobby website - and need this facility.

Keywords

aol, email, pop3, non-AOL, email settings

Solution

I can't explain in detail how to configure the settings in every email client and version. Nor can I provide the exact settings which the company hosting your website should provide you with. But here are the settings which currently work for my AOL connected clients.

1. Incoming mail (POP3): mail.yourdomain.co.uk (the incoming mail server provided by the company hosting your domain)
2. Outgoing mail (SMTP): mail.yourdomain.co.uk (the outgoing mail server provided by the company hosting your domain)
3. The account name and password for your Incoming Mail Server should be provided by the company hosting your domain
4. For the Outgoing Mail Server, your account should be set to require authentication and this is usually set to use the same settings as your incoming mail server. Secure Password Authentication doesn't seem to be required.
5. VERY IMPORTANT: Your Outgoing Mail Port number should be set to 587.
   AOL have closed most other ports (including the usual default, 25)

Additional Notes

I'm very keen to know if these settings help anybody to set up their own email accounts and to know of any further information which should be offered on this page. So please if this solution has worked for you or you can provide further useful information or comments.

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