Provide email authentication for the SMTP Email library

[waldemar.hersacher]

Most email server need authentication not only for POP3 to retrieve emails but also for SMTP.

This issue is coming up for a lot of years from time to time. In deed the SMTP Email library built into LV is unusable today.

Everyone is complaining about spam which often is send using open email servers without authentication so you have not the chance to find the real sender of unwanted emails. Since most of use are not this kind of senders we have regular account needing to authenticate.

[Jervin Justin]

Hi waldemar,

We just launched a new branch of the NI Idea Exchange to foster ideas for LabVIEW Add-ons. The intent was to create a place for LabVIEW Add-on developers (both NI R&D and developers in the community) to find ideas that matter to the community.

This is part of our ongoing effort to enable LabVIEW developers to productize LabVIEW code. Some of the other things we’ve done this year were adding Licensing & Activation for 3^rd Parties, launching the Compatible with LabVIEW Program and the LabVIEW Tools Network.

We’ve identified your particular idea as one that could potentially be made into an Add-on and would like to move it to this new Idea Exchange so that Add-on developers can easily find it. Would this be okay with you?

Thanks!

[BlueCheese]

Cleaning up my hard drive I remembered I ran across this same need when developing a demo used at NI Week 2011. I modified the SMTP VIs to allow simple authentication. Note that the password is only hashed, not using a more modern TLS/SSL encryption (would require external libraries), so be aware that third parties with access to your network traffic on either end could capture your login information.

The two additions I made to the standard SMTP VIs are the ability to provide login info (user/pass) as well as put a different port number than the default port 25 (since outgoing access to port 25 is often restricted to prevent relaying spam via infected computers).

Again, to use these VIs you need to have an SMTP server that allows unencypted (but authenticated) login. This means it doesn't work with things like GMail or other big name providers but it will work with any number of smaller email providers.

(Note: Some of the VIs may conflict in name with the original SMTP VIs - I edited them in-place to add this capability)

You can grab the VIs here:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/attachments/ni/170/643637/1/SMTP%20with%20simple%20auth%20and%20arbitrary%20...

Eric

[Darren]

Available with the LabVIEW SMTP Email VIs in LabVIEW 2013 and later