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### 5.3 POP before SMTP

Does your ISP use POP-before-SMTP authentication? This authentication method simply requires you to contact the POP server before sending email. To do that, put the following lines in your `~/.gnus.el` file:

    (add-hook 'message-send-mail-hook 'mail-source-touch-pop)

The `mail-source-touch-pop` function does POP authentication according to the value of `mail-sources` without fetching mails, just before sending a mail. See Mail Sources.

If you have two or more POP mail servers set in `mail-sources`, you may want to specify one of them to `mail-source-primary-source` as the POP mail server to be used for the POP-before-SMTP authentication. If it is your primary POP mail server (i.e., you are fetching mails mainly from that server), you can set it permanently as follows:

    (setq mail-source-primary-source
          '(pop :server "pop3.mail.server"
                :password "secret"))

Otherwise, bind it dynamically only when performing the POP-before-SMTP authentication as follows:

    (add-hook 'message-send-mail-hook
              (lambda ()
                (let ((mail-source-primary-source
                       '(pop :server "pop3.mail.server"
                             :password "secret")))
                  (mail-source-touch-pop))))