I noticed a post on the ARUser Yahoo group which is used, among other purposes, to discuss the VE7CC DX Cluster program. The program creates a local DX Cluster on your computer which you can configure to your hearts content. For me, as an example, it shows only spots that are related to North America stations so I don’t see an 80m spot that is posted by a station in Russia to a station in Germany.

The post indicated a user couldn’t get the DX Spot Alerts that send emails to work on Verizon FIOS. Now I had never tried to do that with this program, but years ago I had the same issue/need to send emails on Verizon FIOS from a weather program that did not support SMTP Authentication. SMTP Authentication is a fancy name for having to supply an account & password when you send email. Supplying an account & password to receive email is normal but much less frequently needed on sending email. If the program sending email (VE7CC in this case) doesn’t support supplying an account name and password, it won’t work with mail servers that require it.

A quick search turns up the program I used in the past. It’s called SMTPAuth and is located at http://netwinsite.com/dmail/smtpauth.htm. The web page indicates Windows operating system support through XP. Well, I’m running Windows 7 64-bit and it still works. I don’t have a Vista machine to test on but I imagine it works with Vista as well. I downloaded the program from the page to my desktop. The first time I ran it the install didn’t complete so I needed to re-run the installation as Administrator which the program detected and did for me automatically. I imagine just right clicking the program on the desktop and selecting Run as administrator will do the same thing. The program launches a command window which asks for your mail server. For Verizon FIOS, it is outgoing.verizon.net but if you aren’t using Verizon FIOS, you can check your existing mail program to see how it is setup or check your ISPs web site. You then need to specify your email account name with the ISP and the password associated with that email account. Once you do that, you’ll see something similar to the following:

SmtpAuth Version 1.04 Setup for Windows NT
Initialisation:
Enter your outgoing(smtp) mail server: outgoing.verizon.net
Enter your user name <>: abc123
Enter your password: xxxxxxxx
Saving settings...done
Stopping SmtpAuth...failed
Adding service...done
Starting SmtpAuth Version 1.04...done
Testing Smtp Authentication...
Everything seems fine
SmtpAuth Version 1.04 was successfully installed
In your email client, set up your outgoing(smtp) mail server to be "127.0.0.1"
To uninstall smtpauth, run smtpauth again, and choose the delete option
Press any key to finish
Windows Services shows SmtpAuth Version 1.04 which can be stopped or started as you want.

You now have a local SMTP server running on your PC. Then in VE7CC or whatever program you want to use that needs to send email, you specify 127.0.0.1 as the email server. For VE7CC specifically, you would click on the Configuration menu and select Alarm Setup. That opens a window where on the right side you can specify your To & From email address and the box underneath those is where you enter in 127.0.0.1 for the mail server. That indicates that the mail server is running locally on your machine.

That’s all there is to it. If you have any questions, you can post them here or email me directly and I’ll try to help.

73,
K2DSL