[@djp Member 16 years, 8 months ago]

Woohoo!!! Got the PEAR-shaped workaround working.

A guy called Rob Hartzenberg at my hosting provider wrote the plugin for bbpress that uses the PEAR mail package to allow authentication.

All I needed to do was:

1. download & edit the plugin file to reflect my own SMTP host, port number, username (email address) & my password;

2. replace the last line of the bb_mail() function in “bb-includes/pluggable.php with 2 lines of code supplied in the installation instructions;

3. Login as keymaster & activate the plugin.

Voila!

I will be uploading the plugin shortly as I reckon there will be people in need of this workaround as quite a lot of hosting providers require SMTP authentication.

What a relief

many thanks to everyone that tried to assist & an even bigger THANK YOU to Rob at Imaginet.