Outlook and Thunderbird are two examples of programs that aren't laptop ready. The reason being that the SMTP setup is fixed. Most SMTP servers have IP whitelists, meaning that only a few, known IP addresses are allowed to send mail through them. Therefore, the SMTP server that is used should vary with my current IP address which changes all the time.
Apple Mail solved this problem - if an SMTP server rejects the connection, it will try the next known SMTP server until a connection is accepted.

I am quick to tell developers off if they seem too attached to a metaphor. In this case however, the mail metaphor actually works really well. You have a personal mail box where mail sent to you ends up. And then you have the mail boxes on the street corners for outgoing mail. Those are perfect analogues to POP3 and SMTP. Outlook uses the metaphor of an account where stuff enters and leaves, which means that an account knows about a POP3 server and an SMTP server.