mail server config

Sorry, but this does not make sense to me, so let me back up a step..

In order to send email, a given tool needs to have information about the smtp server it is going to use; so if I am sending email from the Drupal SMTP module, or even Thunderbird, I need to specify the mail server address, port, login, and password.

When I configure the SMTP and CiviCRM modules, I tell each module all this information (smtp via the admin settings, crm via the config.php file).. somewhere Simplenews needs to get this information, but I don't see where that is..

glancing at the activeMailLib.php file, this would seem to be the relevant code..

function mkCheckServer($email){
// no validation if OS is Windows, return true
if(defined("PHP_OS") && !strcmp(substr(PHP_OS,0,3),"WIN")) return array(true, "This method is not supported on Windows systems");
list($user,$domain) = split("@",$email,2);
$mxlist=false;
if ($this->checkserv){
@getmxrr($domain,$mxlist);
$result=array(false,$domain." Mailserver not found");

I don't fully understand this, but perhaps it is trying to consider the newsletter subscriber's email address as a viable smtp server?

I just need a way to tell simplenews to use my ISP's email server using a specific login/password (just like the smtp module does)

I should mention that I am using the 4.7 version of simplenews - I don't think 4.7 has been patched to use mimemail?

thanks

Thanks to jandoemen for the ideas and link to the external relay thread.. sadly this ended up not working because it still required access to the php.ini (which was the original problem)..

I ended up crafting a different solution and wondered if anyone might see a problem:

I altered the mail send method (sn_mail_send) to use the SMTP module instead of using activeMail.. I had ported the mimeMail stuff back from the drupal 5 version, but it didn't help and I really don't get mimeMail (it looks for $module .'_mailengine' functions) so I looked at SMTP which was able to send test emails for me - bypassing the php mail settings. Here is the code

function sn_mail_send($mail) {
$from_email = variable_get('site_mail', 'myMail@myHost.org');

$headers = "From:$from_email\nReply-To:$from_email\nX-Mailer:Drupal\nReturn-Path:$from_email\nErrors-To:$from_email\nContent-Type:text/html";

return user_mail($mail->to, $mail->title, $mail->message, $headers);
}

this is largely stolen from the user.module and relies on the user_mail_wrapper technique.. to make this more official, you would wrap it in a "if (module_exist('smtp'))" block..
note that the Content-Type bit in the headers string is required to force SMTP to do HTML emails.. if this is missing, it defaults to plain text.

so far, this sends perfect test newsletters via the email gateway configured in the SMTP settings..

red flags from anyone? is it worth adding the ability to send via SMTP in addition to mimeMail?