Set up 2 outgoing email servers for email notification

Why use two outgoing email servers?

Even reliable email providers — including iCloud, Gmail, and Yahoo — are occasionally unreachable. In our testing, we have seen times when even major email servers are temporarily unavailable. We therefore recommend configuring two outgoing email servers for SoftRAID’s email notifications to ensure you always receive alerts when they matter most.

When two servers are configured, you will not receive duplicate notifications. The second server — called the Alternate — is only used if SoftRAID cannot successfully send a notification using the primary server. Think of it as an automatic fallback.

How to configure two outgoing email servers

• Open SoftRAID Preferences → Notifications
• Configure your primary SMTP server settings
• Click on the Alternate server section and configure a second SMTP server using a different email provider

Using two different providers (for example, Gmail as your primary and iCloud as your alternate) gives you the best protection, since an outage at one provider is unlikely to affect the other at the same time.

Application-specific passwords

Many email providers — including Gmail and iCloud — require an application-specific password when a third-party application like SoftRAID connects to send email. This is separate from your regular account password and is required even if you use the same email address.

Gmail:

• Go to your Google Account at myaccount.google.com
• Select Security
• Under “How you sign in to Google,” ensure 2-Step Verification is enabled
• Search for App Passwords and generate a new one for SoftRAID
• Use this generated password in SoftRAID’s SMTP password field — not your regular Gmail password

iCloud:

• Go to appleid.apple.com and sign in
• Under Sign-In and Security, select App-Specific Passwords
• Click + to generate a new password for SoftRAID
• Use this generated password in SoftRAID’s SMTP password field — not your regular Apple ID password

Note: If your email login stops working after a password change, remember to generate a new application-specific password and update SoftRAID’s settings.