said by robby :I can't be the only one who has this issue?
You are not the only one. I have a lifetime email address with PoBox.com which is forwarded to whatever service I am currently subscribed to. It has much better spam protection and offers an authenticated login to their SMTP service. My issue is not that Telus doesn't offer authenticated login, but the fact that their service is painfully slow on outbound mail. Complaints to Telus have so far fallen on deaf ears.
My email Client program does not offer authenticated login, and I have not been able to find an alternative that offers the features that I have grown accustomed to. So I wrote my own email program, and now I can use PoBox.com for outbound email. Even though transit times are much longer to their SMTP server, it ends up more than 10 times faster than the Telus SMTP server.