Re: libESMTP 0.8

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 14 June 20:58 Michael Duelli wrote:
| Hi Ali,
| 
| well I also got my little problems with libESMTP.
| If I really understand now what it is all about you need
| an additional application, e.g. sendmail, to send your mail,
| correct ?

This is getting tedious.

LibESMTP uses the SMTP protocol (SMTP is the protocol used on the
Internet to transfer mail from system to system) to submit mail
to an MTA (colloquially known as a mail server).  This is exactly
what Unix Netscape, Eudora, Outlook Express etc. etc. does, so
libESMTP, and therefore Balsa, doing the same is hardly radical.
Furthermore, mail server configuration is virtually identical.
If you've ever configured Netscape Messenger on a linux box, you
already know what to do for Balsa.

LibESMTP does not require any other programs or libraries in order to
do this, it is completely self contained.  This was a design goal.

What you *do* need, however, is an MTA to submit your mail to, but
then you needed that before.

If you are in a coprporate environment, your sysadmin will tell you
the domain name of the server you should use.  You might submit mail
using your ISP's MTA.  Alternatively, you might be running sendmail
or some other MTA as a daemon on the localhost, so you could use that.

In any case, the traditional Un*x method of mail submission required
sendmail to be installed on *every* host running a mail client, and
as you observe configuring sendmail and running sendmail has its own
problems.

By using libESMTP, at worst, you still need sendmail; at best you
don't need anything extra because the MTA is on another system
maybe even running on another operating system.

| As I don't like it when sendmail makes my PC wait for a minute
| everytime
| I (re)boot, I simply downgraded two balsa 1.1.4. It's still on the
| server.

Then your sendmail configuration is wrong, a corerctly configured
sendmail starts quickly.  This is hardly the fault of libESMTP and
is certainly not a good reason for despising it.  If you need
help with sendmail you could try looking on comp.mail.sendmail

Hope this helps