Email sending (SMTP)

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send emails. The remote server is an SMTP server, and it determines which settings are required to send an email. You will usually use your company’s mail server. Accordingly, you will receive the necessary parameters from your IT administration team.

The following configuration parameters are available for the SMTP protocol setting:

Hostname

A URL that points to the server. Example: “smtp.visualenergy.de”. This URL must be accessible from the visual energy system.

Port

The port number on which the server can be reached.

Typical ports:

  • SMTP (unencrypted): Port 25.
  • SMTP (with TLS transport encryption): Port 587

Transport encryption

  • None – Transport encryption is not used.
  • Auto – The client and server negotiate the security settings.
  • StartTLS – The connection is initially established in unencrypted plain text and only switches to encrypted communication afterwards.
  • SSL / TLS – Encrypted communication between client and server.

Trust all certificates

Self-signed certificates are often used, particularly in internal company applications. However, this means that it is not possible to establish a clear chain of trust back to a root certificate, and therefore the trust relationship cannot be established. You should therefore enable this option by selecting YES to trust these certificates as well, or select NO if only officially valid certificates are used.

Authentication required

In official email systems, it is standard practice that only known and authorised users are permitted to use the SMTP mail server to send emails. Otherwise, it would not be possible, for example, to prevent anonymous spammers from sending spam. On the other hand, in purely in-house applications, it is not common for every technical system capable of sending status emails to internal recipients to be assigned its own email account. The administrative burden would, if anything, be quite considerable. That is why many such internal mail servers have policies in place which allow internal emails to be sent even without logging in with a user account, while at the same time preventing uncontrolled sending to external addresses. In such cases, the option can be set to NO. In all other cases, the option is YES and a username and password must be entered.

Username

Valid account if “Authentication required” is set to “YES”.

Password

Valid password