The advent of spam has seen some significant limitations placed on the amount of emails that one is allowed to send from his or her free email account. What a lot of people do not realize is that the solution is sitting right under their noses and it does not involve purchasing software or subscribing to a premium email service. It can all be done from Windows XP Professional, and the most basic setup takes just a couple of minutes.

Instructions after the jump.
First of all, some limitations, this setup will only allow you to send from your home network, you can make it remotely accessible, but it is a lot more work and takes a lot more time to explain.

First things first, you will need one PC running Windows XP Professional. You can also do this from Vista, but that explanation will come another day.

Next, you are going to need your Windows XP Professional CD, if you don’t have it in your drive, you will be prompted for it. Open up your Control Panel, open Add/Remove Programs followed by Add/Remove Windows Components.

Browse through the list of components until you find Internet Information Services (IIS), check the box and open the details. Make sure that SMTP Service is selected and install the package. It requires a negligible amount of disk space, 13.5MB, the last time I checked.

The final stage is to configure your virtual server. If you are happy just running it from home, on the home network, then there is little that needs to be done in this regard. Open your Control Panel once again, and then open Administrative Tools. You should now see an icon for Internet Information Services, open that and you will see your computer name. Click the plus box next to the computer name and you will see two options, Web Sites and Default SMTP Virtual Server. Double click on the latter.

From here, you can configure your Virtual SMTP Server any way that you like. If you are going to go to the extra step of setting up for external access, then it would be best to ensure that the connection is authenticated, however, if you are just operating locally, then the connection can be anonymous. Make sure that your computer’s network IP is in the IP address box and you are ready to go. You can now send email from your own computer.

For configuring email clients, simply put your computer’s network IP as the SMTP server address. Note, that if you are doing this on a laptop and you operate from different networks, then you would do well to change from an automatically assigned IP to a user defined IP. That way you probably won’t have to adjust the IP in your mail client if you want to send mail from other networks. Otherwise, just do an ipconfig and reset your SMTP connection in your mail client as required.

For the latest info on the coolest gadgets, emerging technology and wired madness, subscribe to our full news feed , have it delivered to your inbox or follow us on Twitter . Always free. Always unique. Thanks for visiting!

Related posts

• XP Ninja: How to Ensure That Your System Never Goes to Sleep (0)
• XP Ninja: How to Stop Automatic Updates From Ever Restarting Your System Without Permission (4)
• XP Ninja: Give up the Monitor and Access Your System Remotely - Part 1 (On Your Own Network) (0)