[EAS] email configuration for Gmail?

[David Turnmire]

Well, IMHO, it is unreasonable to expect EAS vendors to support an email 
protocol that is almost never supported by other broadcast equipment.  
Lots of equipment in my TV station support email... but they all use 
SMTP.  They vary in their support of SMTP... some won't support 
authentication or "non-standard" ports, etc.  But they all at least 
support the basics.  I manage the Exchange server here and it has no 
problem handling SMTP connections from various devices on our network. 
IMHO, there isn't a significant security issue there since firewalls 
keep ALL access to the Exchange server from the outside world blocked 
and it won't relay even internally generated email except in those cases 
I specify.  As mentioned by others, it is easy enough to specify 
exception(s) by IP address, etc for the SMTP protocol.

I've spent the last 30+ years on a university campus and I've almost 
never had an issue making a reasonable request to their IT staff (had to 
argue a bit to get OpenDNS allowed).  There is so many different things 
being done by different departments on campus, that it is hard to 
imagine it would be possible to restrict ALL email to MAPI... there are 
simply too many cases where that isn't viable for specialized 
applications (including within the IT department itself).  Not to 
mention a zillion students running around with personal gmail/yahoo/etc 
accounts. So I understand if their general policy for office 
staff/faculty/etc is to require MAPI (we don't have IMAP enabled and 
restrict access to POP)... but it is easy technically to make the 
exceptions in a reasonably secure fashion.

In short... I'd suggest skipping the basic "help desk" personnel and 
talk to someone who can make decisions and explain your needs.  It is 
hard to believe that you couldn't get accommodation to a reasonable 
request for an exception based upon a narrow source IP address range 
(maybe even a nonstandard port) and authenticated access.  Either that, 
or an exception in their outgoing firewall for that IP address to talk 
to Google's server, though that might be a bit trickier since who knows 
how "stable" the IP addresses are of Google's email servers.

Dave

On 6/19/2012 2:45 PM, Alex Hartman wrote:
> The entire mail system is handled by the state of MN system, so i'm
> sure there's some very asinine policies in place. Like i said, i know
> that if the originating connection is internal (on the 199.17.x.x/16
> block) SMTP is disabled. If i do it externally, SMTP/SSL/TLS is
> employed for connections back to the servers on campus.
>
> I believe that Google/Android did license ActiveSync like you
> mentioned, but there are other implementations in the wild as far as
> MAPI support (think third party Android images, evolution mail
> program, etc). If there's enough codespace in the Sage ENDECs or not
> to handle it, who knows. Probably not.
>
> Native Exchange support should be an item on a lot of this gear. Most
> radio/tv stations use Exchange/SBS as well, not to mention most public
> stations who rely (like me) on the university network. I understand
> the coding nightmare it brings with it, but like it or not, this is a
> Microsoft world still.
>
> The best part of this whole adventure is, before 2005, the university
> used Unix/BSD. They had 3 mail servers handling all users running on
> Sun gear. Barely broke a sweat. Now they spend millions on maintaining
> a Microsoft system that makes all the users jump through hoops and
> purchase more software. Go figure.
>