Last week I sent an email from  my Gmail account which I had setup in Evolution on my home computer.  Two days later I was surprised to find it still in the Outbox. I deleted the email as it was of no use now and made a mental To do to fix the problem as I was busy with other  important things  to be done -besides it still did work from my notebook -or I thought it did. A few days later I replied to a personal email from my notebook via my Gmail account and it is still lying in my outbox. This confirmed the fact that some settings had changed an Gmail’s end.

I was surprised at not receiving an email from Google to this effect, but gave them the benefit of doubt as I receive vast amounts of email and I could have easily  have missed something from Gmail thinking it was some uninteresting email message like the various automated mails I receive from numerous bots whose websites I have subscribed to.Today I forwarded an interesting link to a friend and found it stuck in my outbox again which finally got my goat. A quick Google search revealed the usual mix of fixes -from the real ,to the imagined and to outright stupid. The secret to searching Google is the ability to distinguish between useful information and nonsense. As you get better at it, there will be a lot of links that you will not even bother to click.

Then there are those half truths…Someone said that Gmail had changed its outgoing port number and had not updated their How To docs…. believable, but its unlike Google not  updating their docs and so I went to check out Gmail’s own help pages. I could not find  Evolution listed there, but found some unintelligible hyper technical trash so I clicked on the link to Thunderbird and scrolled through the screenshots. The same stuff applies for Evolution as well.

Open Evolution and click on Edit > Preferences. Click on Mail Accounts and then select your Gmail account.

Click Edit and then on the sending email Tab. If you had a working Gmail account setup, You should see the following settings.

Server smtp.gmail.com:465

The checkbox on My Server requires authentication ticked

Security : Use secure connection SSL encryption

and your full email (gmail) address as your  username

All you now need to do is change the port number for the outgoing smtp server smtp.gmail.com to  587 instead of 465 and then select TLS encryption instead of SSL!  Now that I have done my good deed for the day, I  can go ahead with my schedule for today afternoon/evening – A photo shoot of the Surajkund Annual Crafts mela (fair) The focus is on Rajasthan this year! Read more about it here

SMTP Settings for Gmail in Evolution

1. Alejandro Ruiz August 18, 2010 7:15 am

   Thanks a lot missing some changes to make mi account work

   [Translate]
2. Benjy August 18, 2010 11:59 am

   Glad to be of help Alejandro

   [Translate]

Comment on this post

If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.