RapidoSMTP Rocks!

This will be relatively short and sweet. It’s certainly sweet, anyway.

I’ve been away at a conference/music camp called ZoukFest 2007 in Santa Fe. The venue is the very nice College of Santa Fe, and we’re actually staying in the dorms. Yeah man, communal bathrooms at my age, nothing like it. After living nearly 30 years with the same woman, I’d forgotten what a bathroom full of men sounds like at 7:00 a.m… nothing like it, lemme tell ya.

Now where was I? Oh yes, staying in the dorm, with a fine cable Internet connection, except I couldn’t send email out, a situation many of you are familiar with. Couldn’t swing it from the on-campus wireless network, either. But I found a dandy little freeware app called RapidoSMTP that does the following, according to the folks who designed it:

RapidoSMTP allows you to turn on the Postfix SMTP server built into Mac OS X, which will allow you to send mail from from any applications like Apple Mail or Microsoft Entourage without using the SMTP server of your internet provider. For example, it’s very useful if you have a laptop and if you are tired to change settings when you move.

I can report that it works just dandy. Installing it is a tad complicated for the casual user, but then a casual user probably doesn’t care about sending emails from airports and strange bookstore cafes. I did have to set the port to “587” instead of 25, and don’t ask me what that means, because I don’t know. But it WORKS, ladies and gentlemen, and that is a real delight.

One caveat: I’ve seen at least one comment that this thing will not necessarily function from certain residential Internet accounts, which would be a pain, since I’d have to un-install it when I go home, if that’s the case. I’ll be home late Saturday night, so I’ll post a quick update if there are any problems.

I have to say, though, that it was HUGE FUN to be sitting in a lounge with a bunch of disgruntled PC users and find this Mac app that lets me send email. Download, install, BOOM! Off the message goes.

More later, stay tuned.