Hi. So I am pulling my hair out over setting up a MTA. I have tried Sendmail, Postfix and netqmail today and none have worked.

I have an IMAP email account for my University. The email accounts we are given are typically accessed from a web email program. I want to use my email in Thunderbird however the school provides no SMTP. I tried using my Gmail smtp but it reports that the email of course came from my gmail account.

I would like to be able to check my email in Thunderbird, send from there also and have it appear as it came from my university email. Currently, every MTA other than sendmail times out when it says connecting to localhost:25. Sendmail connects and sends the mail but it is stuck in an eternal queue.

In IRC today someone mentioned to me that I have to enable my account as a trusted user before I can send outgoing mail. I have setup a web server before and my php email forms work just fine and I didn't have to play around with a trusted user but who knows that may have been setup by default.

If anyone can please point me to some help I would appreciate it alot. Thanks.

Your ISP may be blocking port 25 and at any rate if you don't have a static IP and reverse DNS everybody will throw away your mail. Thanks to the spammers for making it impossible for a normal person to send mail from his own computer.

You need to use your ISP or mail provider's SMTP and like you already know, POP or IMAP for inbound. You can probably set a Reply-To header in TBird so that even if you outbound from gmail when they hit reply it will come to the account you want.

Thanks for the reply and reminding me about the reply-to option. Too bad about the local mail server but I rather live with having to use another outgoing mail server than having more spam floating around.