Jelle Druyts

Now that's what I call good news: GMail is introducing POP access to its service. I just enabled it and it's all working great! So no more whining, I now officially declare GMail the best free email service in the known part of this world.

Extra treat if you live in Belgium and you're using Skynet as your ISP: it uses an encrypted SMTP connection (not on port 25). Why is that nice? Glad you asked!

In case you haven't noticed, Skynet has blocked port 25 recently so you're forced to use their SMTP server. Now that wouldn't be all bad if it would, well, work. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to suck big time: the last few weeks it has been impossible to get a mail delivered to any Yahoo address. At first it just bounced back but I guess that was too straight-forward: now it just disappears completely without a trace. I've called it in with support but they say there's a problem relaying to the Yahoo servers and that there's no solution. That's right: they're saying not a single Skynet user can send email to a Yahoo address through their SMTP server. And they're not allowing other SMTP servers. Their proposed solution is to create a free account like Yahoo or Hotmail and send through there. Thanks for the great idea guys but I'll be using the GMail SMTP server from now on, thanks very much.