The Droid 2 easily syncs with your Gmail or Yahoo account, but when you add other email accounts—like your work email or home ISP account—you have to enter all of the account and server information yourself. And that’s where errors can creep in despite your best efforts. Even if you set the account up successfully at first, you may encounter problems later, like being unable to send email.
If you’re having trouble getting email to work for the first time, the most likely problem is that you’ve got a setting wrong, like your incoming or outgoing server. To check these settings, go to the Application Tray, tap My Accounts, and then tap the email account you’re having problems with. Tap each of the settings you see here—Incoming Server, Outgoing Server, and so on—and make sure you’ve entered everything correctly. Even a single misplaced letter or number will cause a problem. Check your ISP’s website, or call your ISP to confirm the settings. You may have copied down the settings wrong, or your ISP has different settings for accessing email on a mobile phone. If it’s a work email account, call your company’s IT department for assistance.
Any computer—including your Droid 2, which is, after all, a computer—uses what are called ports to communicate with the Internet. They’re not physical things; think of them as different channels. So one port is used for web traffic, another for sending email, another for receiving email, and so on. To cut down on spam-sending, some ISPs curtail the use of the standard port for sending mail—port 25. When you send mail using port 25 via these ISPs, they let your mail go to your ISP’s mail servers, but not get sent anywhere from there. So your message never gets delivered to the recipient. To get around the problem, you have a couple of alternatives.
From the Application Tray, tap My Accounts and then tap the email account you’re having problems with. Tap the Outgoing Server listing, and on the screen that appears, in the Port box, delete 25 and type 587.
You can use Gmail’s server even to send email from another account. On the Outgoing Server screen, use the following settings:
For SMTP, enter smtp.gmail.com.
For Port, enter 465.
For user name and password, use your Gmail user name (your full Gmail address) and password.
Turn on the checkboxes next to “Use secure connection” and Verify Certificate.