I got a new laptop and it’s wonderful to be able to connect to the Internet from basically anywhere through wireless, but unfortunately many places block port 25 in order to prevent spam. Fair enough, but I still want to send mail while I’m on the road, and webmail is so 90’s compared to Thunderbird.

If you’re hosted on Media Temple you’re in luck because you have access to 1) an outgoing SMTP server 2) SSH access to your server and 3) a fixed IP (any other host with these conditions should work too). So the trick is to connect to a mail server using port forwarding through SSH. Thus as long as port 22 is not blocked everything you send over port 25 on your machine will be dumped onto the server and port you set through the SSH connection… I don’t understand very well the internal mechanics of it but basically all you need to do is:

• Download and install OpenSSH.
• In a DOS window, run ssh -L 25:ipaddress:25 login@server.com (fill ipaddress and login@server.com with the values for your domain)
• Enter the password when prompted
• In Thunderbird, go into Tools > Account settings > Outgoing Server and use “localhost” (without the quotes) as the server name.

Then all you need to do is send the mail as usual and as long as you’re connected through SSH it should send the mail properly even though port 25 is blocked. If you want to configure several SMTP servers and make it less of a pain to switch get the Buttons! extension and drop the Select SMTP! button on the send mail toolbar.