So you’ve got some horrible application that needs to send out email but doesn’t support TLS or possibly even authenticated SMTP. Of course it’s critically important to the business and the vendor has no intention of implementing anything to help you out. You’ve done your cloud migration and the cloud vendor of course has disabled plain text SMTP ages ago. What do you do hotshot? WHAT DO YOU DO?
Well one way around it is to keep an on premise mail server, perhaps Exchange if you live the Office 365 life. This becomes a pain though, keeping it patched and having something else to administer. What you need is a lightweight relaying agent that you can install on your application server. That’s where http://emailrelay.sourceforge.net/ comes in. It comes in *nix and Windows flavours and is nice and easy to install. The Windows installer walks you through the process and installs itself as a service.
Obviously you need to set up an account for the outbound email. In Office 365 this is nice and easy to do. Make sure you remember to enable “Authenticated SMTP” for the user in the the “Mail” tab in the 365 admin portal as it’s disabled by default. You probably also want to disable password expiry for the new account.
Set your outbound server to smtp.office365.com port 587 with STARTTLS enabled, enter your new 365 credentials and away you go. Make sure you don’t enable remote clients in EmaiRelay or people will be able to send out as the configured user which is obviously a bad thing.
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