@home e-mail SMTP help

king chung huang

Hi everyone,



I'm finally moving to Mac OS X full time on my home computer, but I've run into a slight problem migrating my main email account. I'm on Shaw@Home cable internet access in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Shaw's instructions indicate that I should enter 'shawmail' as the SMTP server for outgoing mail. This worked in Outlook Express in Mac OS 9, but in Mail.app in Mac OS X 10.1.4, Mail says "Can?t determine IP address of host: shawmail.."



Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get Mail to work with this weird address for my SMTP host? I've noticed that in the error message, there's two periods after 'shawmail'. Perhaps Mail is inserting a period after 'shawmail', causing the DNS lookup to fail?

eugene

Your ISP most likely tells you to add a search domain in your TCP/IP Network settings. it should be yourisp.com or whatever.



My machine at work used to be hurricane.ocf.berkeley.edu. With a search domain of ocf.berkeley.edu, all I had to put into my mail clients was the hostname of the mail server "mail" . mail.ocf.berkeley.edu was unecessary because it would automatically append ".ocf.berkeley.edu" to incomplete hostname/domains.



You can either add the search domain to your TCP/IP settings or find out what the full domain of your mail server is and just type that into the SMTP server field...it's probably shawmail.shawcable.net or something like that. find out what your IP resolves to and chop off the first part and replace it with shawmail...that might work...

king chung huang

Thanks, Eugene! I added the appropriate address domain to my Search Domains in the Network preferences, and it works perfectly now.