Purpose

 

In this age of proliferation of "Spam", SMTP servers are commonly configured such that a client program wishing to send email via the server must authenticate, that is, provide identification credentials in the form of a user name and password. NetMailBot provides the -authlogin and -authpassword parameters, respectively, for use in specifying these credentials.

 

Using NetMailBot's -debug parameter logs all of the interaction between NetMailBot and the SMTP server to a log file. The details in the log file can point out instances when you need to use NetMailBot's authentication parameters in order to be able to send email with that SMTP server.

 

Prepared Example Files

 

 

The archive contains one file:

 

• SMTPAuthentication.bat - The batch file that will instruct NetMailBot to send the email message.

 

Batch File Contents

 

This is the content of the batch file:

 

NetMailBot -to to@mailserver.com -from from@mailserver.com -subject "simple send with authentication" -server mail.mailserver.com -authlogin userid -authpassword password -logfile "c:\tmp\log.txt" -debug

 

Steps

 

1. Unzip the SMTPAuthentication.zip file. This will produce a directory called "SMTPAuthentication". Open this directory.
2. Open Notepad and edit the batch file "SMTPAuthentication.bat". Change the values of the parameters -to, -from, and -server to a test recipient email address of your choosing, your email address, and your mail server. Also provide your username and password for the SMTP server in the -authlogin and -authpassword parameters, respectively. 

 

NOTE: If you don't know your authentication credentials, ask your system administrator or ISP. If you don't have or can't get such credentials for the chosen SMTP server, you probably won't be able to use that SMTP server for sending your mails, or you might be restricted to only sending mails to recipients within the same domain (i.e. if your server is smtp.mycompany.com, you might only be able to send emails to recipients whose email addresses are in the form xxxxx@mycompany.com).

3. Invoke the batch file by double-clicking the icon or straight from the command line.
4. NetMailbot should start up and, upon finishing, the email addresses specified with the -to parameter should each receive an email message. Check the logfile to see if everything went well with the authentication process.