Configuring Roller to use GMail SMTP server (Was Re: Activating email with a Roller installation)

Thanks, I now have Roller trunk successfully deployed to Tomcat using 
the Derby database.  I'm trying unsuccessfully so far to use my Google 
email account for sending comment/moderation notifications.  Google may 
be more challenging because it uses port 465 (SSL) instead of 25.  (I 
haven't tried any other SMTP servers.)

I would much prefer the simpler roller-custom.properties instead of JNDI 
config, but according to this email[1] from 2009, I need to use JNDI 
because Google mail wants SSL for its SMTP server.  Is that still the 
case?  If so I can rule out trying to get config working via 
roller-custom.properties:

mail.configurationType=properties
mail.hostname=smtp.googlemail.com  (also tried smtp.gmail.com with no 
success).
[email protected]
mail.port=465
mail.password=xxxxxxxxx

I can't even get Roller to start if I set the "mail.port" value to 465 
(app seems to freeze), and just get the generic "Failed to setup mail 
provider, continuing anyways" message in my Roller log if I don't set it.

Trying the JNDI configuration as given in [1] isn't working for me 
either, it just silently fails with no message given in roller.log.

Thanks,
Glen

[1] 
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/roller-user/200909.mbox/%[email protected]%3E

On 07/21/2012 09:18 AM, Dave wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 9:21 PM, Glen Mazza <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi, I'd like to install Apache Roller on an Ubuntu Linux desktop machine
>> running Tomcat just to experiment with it.  I'd like to enable the emailing
>> feature, where bloggers get an email whenever people leave comments.  The
>> Roller installation guide is a little vague in this area:  Is there a
>> special mail server I will need to install (Apache James I guess?) to get
>> Roller to send emails or is the emailing capability already built into
>> Roller once I install the activation and mail jars in Tomcat?
> No special mail server is needed. Take a look at Install guide 7.1 and
> 12.2 for details on how to configure mail using either a "properties"
> or "jndi" approach.
>
> - Dave