As more and more hotels and airports appear to be forcing SMTP connections through proxies (that refuse connection if auth is turned on), I’m trying to automate a simple SMTP authentication on/off toggle for our mobile (POP account) users.
I looked at (and tried to learn from) the SMTP Location X script, but that’s too advanced for our needs - I really just want to be able to trigger the script from the Script Menu.
So I tried to cobble a few lines together:
tell application “Microsoft Entourage”
if SMTP requires authentication is true then
set SMTP requires authentication to false
else
set SMTP requires authentication to true
end if
end tell
However, when I try and run this from the Script Editor, it results in the message: “Microsoft Entourage got an error: Can’t get SMTP requires authentication” so something fundamental is going wrong, clearly. Any help with this would be much appreciated.
The way you have it written, you’re saying that “SMTP requires authentication” is a property of the application “Microsoft Entourage” because that’s what you’re talking to (AKA: "Tell"ing)
When you look at the application dictionary, you find the Mail and News Suite. You don’t have to worry about that – the suites are just there for organization.
You’ll see that there’s a “POP account” class. There could be more than one of these set up, so you’ll need to change all of them unless you know you only want to work with one of them.
So just stick the pop account class in there…
tell application “Microsoft Entourage”
tell POP account “yourAcctNameHere”
if SMTP requires authentication is true then
set SMTP requires authentication to false
else
set SMTP requires authentication to true
end if
end tell
end tell
That works.
I’m not familiar with how one can use an SMTP that requires auth if they’re not authenticating, and I’m not sure if you have to keep the auth setting consistent with SMTP uses account settings, SMTP account ID, and SMTP password properties.
A non-AS solution would be to set up a separate Entourage account (same server, different authentication) for them to use when they’re on the road and tell them to select that when composing messages.
As for why disabling SMTP authentication works in practice - the credentials are meaningless to the proxy server which is normally set up to allow anyone on the network (e.g. guests at a hotel) to send out. Entourage isn’t smart enough to know what is happening and therefore requires user intervention.