Connecting to Gmail for Group E-mail

[Dennis Patrick]

I'm unable to connect to the church gmail account through PowerChurch Online for group emails. Our email client is Outlook 2007 and it's configured for gmail. You can send individual emails via PowerChurch without problem. However, we're unable to even get the User Setup configured for Gmail and successfully tested. When you press the test button, PowerChurch freezes up and the only way to regain control is to use the Windows Task Manager process. Once, while attempting to test, Gmail returned a message to our Outlook client indicating that Gmail detected a suspicious attempt (from the PowerChurch Server address) to access the church Gmail account and prevented the connection.

PowerChurch tech staff says that many PowerChurch users use Gmail without problem. Help! What are the appropriate settings for configuring Gmail in PowerChurch User Setup? Proper Outlook 2007 settings? Proper actions to take with the Gmail account to permit PowerChurch online server access to the account?

[NeilZ]

I'm unable to connect to the church gmail account through PowerChurch Online for group emails. Our email client is Outlook 2007 and it's configured for gmail. You can send individual emails via PowerChurch without problem. However, we're unable to even get the User Setup configured for Gmail and successfully tested. When you press the test button, PowerChurch freezes up and the only way to regain control is to use the Windows Task Manager process. Once, while attempting to test, Gmail returned a message to our Outlook client indicating that Gmail detected a suspicious attempt (from the PowerChurch Server address) to access the church Gmail account and prevented the connection.

PowerChurch tech staff says that many PowerChurch users use Gmail without problem. Help! What are the appropriate settings for configuring Gmail in PowerChurch User Setup? Proper Outlook 2007 settings? Proper actions to take with the Gmail account to permit PowerChurch online server access to the account?

First off, when you send individual emails from Powerchurch, it actually uses OUTLOOK to send those individual emails. The built-in SMTP routines are not used except for bulk emails.

The setup for the email system uses much the same setup as does Outlook. I'm assuming that you've entered the full email address you use, checked the 'outgoing email needs authentication, as well as the outgoing SMTP server (for Gmail its smtp.gmail.com). However, you probably need to setup the proper PORT for gmail. You need to add that to the SMTP server like this: smtp.gmail.com:587 if you're using TLS security or smtp.gmail.com:465 for SSL.

You also need to enter the full User name (usually the email address) and password used for that account.

You can verify all this from Outlook by heading to the Accounts area of Outlook and verifying the information. The security information is found by accessing the 'advanced settings' button.

Hope this helps.