skywise

No, the router doesn't matter, almost all routers allow any outgoing. Certain router software (Astaro) is overly paranoid and you have to poke holes in the firewall in both directions, but I don't know of any consumer router that does this by default. The simplest solution is to use the cox SMTP server and whatever cox email ID you have as your From address. You can still use any To address you wish. I'm not in the US or near anything Cox-ish to know what auth you might need or not, maybe a snoop on the cox web page would yield a howto for email setup, that'll let you know what they allow.

Things like iPads are clever beasts and they know all the active ports for a given provider so as part of setup will try all known working ports based on the email address given as your first input, all in the background.

If you have access to a terminal window (cmd line on windows) you can test if port 25 is working out of your home. calvini:~ skywise$ telnet smtp.gmail.com 25 Trying 209.85.225.109... Connected to gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mx.google.com ESMTP de2sm7298391igc.4 ehlo me 250-mx.google.com at your service, [208.81.2.13] 250-SIZE 35882577 250-8BITMIME 250-STARTTLS 250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES quit 221 2.0.0 closing connection de2sm7298391igc.4 Connection closed by foreign host. You could in theory send an entire email via the command line but this bit is enough to confirm network connectivity.

How about for the iPad? Anything that'll show a few of the cams at once? I don't mind paying as long as there's a good chance it'll work.

Just picked up one of those generic linux based CCTV DVRs. http://www.ebay.com/itm/280850705827 I've got it going, mac client works well enough and now it's time to get things working on my iPhone/iPad. There seems to be a bucket load of apps in iTunes but which one works, blows up, or is actually good? Anyone found a good iPhone app they want to recommend?