SMTP and Sky

I’ve spent a merry morning trying to fix a problem with my parents email program. Thunderbird had been happily talking to the Sky email server until a couple of days ago. It turns out that the problem is, for a change, not their windows machines. It’s Sky changing their server.

Sky have outsourced their email to Google. If you check your Sky email account you probably already know about this. If you have your own POP server and don’t check Sky the first you’ll have known about it is when things went wrong. If you can’t send email out then you could try solving the problem by going through the Sky webmail accounts but to save you a lot of hassle here’s the solution to the problem.

Don’t bother and use the standard Googlemail instead.

The first reason is that the Sky helpfiles are either lousy or missing. Some of the links on the Sky Email is changing emails you’ll find lying in your dormant account no longer work. Further Sky’s branding of Googlemail is atrocious. The big difference is that it’s far more difficult to find a help file, and there’ll be a tacky advert taking up screen estate at the top of each page you try and work from. Instead go to www.gmail.com signup for webmail from Googlemail (Gmail outside the EU because of a copyright thing). Then click on your settings and set up either POP or IMAP email. Then for your outgoing server you can use smtp.gmail.com, port 587 with your email as the username and your password as your password.

If you want to persevere with trying to set up Sky mail then you can visit the Skyuser site and search for email, but as far as I’m concerned life’s simply too short. If you’re going to be using Google’s SMTP server anyway then you may as well use one which isn’t going to be outsourced to another company without warning.

Obviously this is not professional advice, and advice from Sky Broadband support may vary. 😉