About Secure SMTP
When you send a file using our service, we send an email to your recipient from files@sendthisfile.com. This email contains a link that gives your recipient the ability to download the file. If you want the email to come from your email address and not ours, Secure Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the way to go. It is an advanced feature that allows your SendThisFile email to originate from your email address* instead of files@sendthisfile.com. Also, it’s a great way to ensure that your important file transfer emails reach your recipients rather than their spam or junk folders. This feature is available in certain paid plans.
Secure SMTP gives your IT department the opportunity to log file transfer emails from SendThisFile for record keeping and auditing purposes. You will even be able to run the emails through your own spam filters.
How does Secure SMTP work?
When using Secure SMTP, SendThisFile acts as a client to your email server. In other words, it simply submits email through a TLS-secured connection to your email server instead of to a SendThisFile email server.
Configuring Secure SMTP
On the SendThisFile side, configuring Secure SMTP is similar to configuring any email client’s outgoing mail server SMTP connection. The information required includes a host name, port number, and login credentials, all of which can be obtained from your email service provider. For example, entering “yahoo email outgoing smtp settings” in a search engine should return results containing a link to an official page that gives you the SMTP settings for Yahoo email.
It is possible that there is some server-side configuration required, especially if your email server is owned or operated by your own organization. Unfortunately, we cannot provide specific instructions for this case, as the requirements for securing email systems vary from organization to organization. For example, some organizations may allow SendThisFile notifications to internal recipients only, while others will require that notifications are allowed to both internal and external recipients. It is up to you to ensure your organization’s email system is configured properly.
General Steps to Add a Secure SMTP Connection
Follow these steps to enable SMTP communication through your email service.
Sign-in to your SendThisFile account, navigate to ‘Settings’ then ‘SMTP Settings’. In the “Add a server” section, there is a field labeled “Host name.”
In the “Host Name” field, enter your email server’s host name, then Click the green “Add” button.
You should now see your email server’s host name displayed under the “SMTP servers you have already setup” section.
Under “SMTP Server Authentication” section, enter the following data:
Under “Default,” select Yes. This sets your outgoing emails to use this email service and associated email address.
Under “Active,” select Yes. This field allows you to toggle using SMTP on and off.
Enter your email account login data in the “User Name” (e.g. email@example.com) and “Password” fields.
Enter a value in the Port field (this will likely be either 587 or 465).
Check the “Secure (SSL/TLS)” checkbox to enable encryption for emails. (Secure SMTP auto-detects whether the connection to your email server supports STARTTLS or SMTPS) Note: encryption will only work if supported by your email service provider.
Click “Save” to save your settings.
In the “SMTP servers you have already setup” section, click the “test” button.
If setup correctly, you will see the following confirmation message: “Success! Please verify that your email server has properly forwarded our test message to your email address.”
Check your inbox for a confirmation message.
If you get an error message, check that you are using the correct host name, username, password and/or port data.
*Error message will be specific to information entered.
You have now successfully set up Secure SMTP. All email notifications will now come from the email address you have set up.*
* While SendThisFile creates the email with the appropriate sender address, we cannot control what the receiving email servers do. Some email servers leave the sender address alone, while others force it to be the same as the email account owner’s email address, which may or may not be what you want. Also, if the sender email address is of a different domain than the domain that the SMTP account serves, there may be problems delivering the email due to Sender Policy Framework (SPF) policies. SendThisFile cannot control any of these factors.