Hello Everyone,

Recently there was a question poised as to how on earth you get Cell Phone Alerts and Email Alerts for an MT4 platform. Here is what you need to know, and what you need to do.

First you are going to need to find an email provider that uses or has SMTP settings. For example, Gmail, Yahoo, GMX, Bluebottle there are many others, if you use a search engine you will get a lot more results. Some of the above emails will NOT work with the MT4 platform. I’ll explain this next.

When you look at your MT4 settings you are given 5 fields that you need to complete, the SMTP Server, SMTP Login, SMTP Password, From:, and To:. Lets start with first things first.

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

SMTP Server:

This consists of the server address and a port number seperated by a colon ‘:’ and nothing else. For those of you that are not familiar with fancy computer language. You are looking for something along the lines of ’smtp.live.com’ as a server address. Its basically telling the client where to go when sending this information. What is my server address? Here is a list of hundreds of email providers and their SMTP servers. If your email provider is not listed here, simply use a search engine to figure out if you have access to SMTP through your email provider. The example I am going to use is for gmx.com, I am going to use this because I know it works. Many of you may have been perusing forums and such and heard about “bluebottle” as an acceptable source for MT4 users. I need you to know that BlueBottle as of June 20, 2008, about 3 months prior to this writing that they discontinued their free email service. Moving on I will make this very easy for everyone.

GMX’s SMTP server address is: mail.gmx.com

Now the second part of this refers to the port number. MT4 platforms show in their examples that the port number ‘25′ should be used. This is because the port 25 is typically used as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP which is what we are looking for. Here are some common email related Port Numbers.

The only two port numbers that you should be concerned with here are 25 and 587. If you are using Gmail, this is where you become out of luck with using your MT4 platform as a means to solve your problems. Gmail allows SMTP but only over a secure connection. SMTP over TLS/SSL, without getting into jargon means just that. So if somewhere along the line you were instructed by your email provider to use port numbers other than 25 or 587 you need to look at a different email for this purpose. If you tried Gmail, or something that required port 465, you probably received an error along the lines of, “Must Issue a STARTTLS command first.” This error message is basically saying you need to allow it to access a secure connection, with MT4 platforms you are only filling out 5 fields and of those five fields none give you that option. This is why Gmail is not compatible. It’s also important to note that ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) often block Port 25 for security reasons, this is where Port 587 can fill the gap. If you try Port 25 and it does not work, try 587. For my ISP, Comcast, I have to use Port 587. So at this point we are able to fill in our first field.

SMTP Server: mail.gmx.com:587

SMTP Login:

This is a fairly easy one to explain. You have a free email account, in this case we are using gmx.com. Let’s say when you registered you wanted your username to be, ‘username,’ and since it was available you were registered. We now enter that email address here

SMTP Login: username@gmx.com

SMTP Password:

This is also easy to explain since it is the password that you used to register at gmx.com. This is a PERSONAL password. Whatever you use to log in to your free email, thats what you enter here. It will appear as a bunch of black dots.

SMTP Password:********

From:

This field should match your SMTP Login or your free email address.

From: username@gmx.com

To:

This field is where you want to send your alert. i.e. your free email address, your main email address, your cell phone(we’ll get to this in a bit)….for right now though lets keep it simple.

To: username@gmx.com

So now we have all five fields filled out, and it looks like this:

At this point you should be feeling pretty good about yourself. So you hit the “Test” button, you may have to wait a minute or two before it appears in your journal. But you are confronted with a new error, one along the lines of “Sender Address does not match logged in user.” If you are like any other user you will probably be stumped at this point and just give up. Well the solution is rather easy, just like adding an indicator to the MT4 platform, you need to reboot your trading platform. After you have logged back in, you should hit the “Test” button and have no further questions as an email should pop up into your free email account in a few moments.

What about cell phone alerts?

Cell phone alerts are just a matter of changing the “To:” field to match your Cell Phone Carriers Email Address to redirect it to your cell phone. Most Cell phones are ten digits in length, area code plus a seven digit number. We are not including country codes. This would make the number 11 digits. So you are looking for a ten digit number.

You would place this “email” in the “To:” field. Below are the Top 6 most common Cell Phone Carriers and the email address you are looking for:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net

Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com

Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com

Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com

Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

Simply replace ‘phonenumber’ with your actual Cell Number. If your Cell phone provider is not listed above, you can find your SMS gateway email address most likely listed here. If its not here then I don’t really know what to say because thats a list of over 60 Cell phone carriers, I would find it hard to believe that you don�