Re: libESMTP 0.8

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On 2001.06.15 19:20:51 +0100 Michael Duelli wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> first of all I would like to say that I like your approach to built a
> "World Domination" SMTP library :-) I am sure that more and more

World domination is an attractive thought but it isn't my primary
objective ...

> programmers will use your library, as it is much easier and less time
> intensive to code.

... that is! :-)

> Okay, my MTA is smtp.web.de and in balsa 1.1.4 and earlier I simply
> configured balsa with:
> 
> SMTP Server: smtp.web.de and Port:25
> 
> Of course this was the first I tried with the newly introduced libESMTP.
> But for unknown reasons it didn't work and even getting the error message
> took a long time. I also tried filling the password and user name but
> this
> didn't work either. Perhaps this is a problem with web.de.

Try building the example program that comes with libESMTP and use it
to send the test mail in the examples directory.  There is a protocol
monitor option which traces the interaction with the SMTP server.
This is quite useful for tracking down problems with mail servers.

> I didn't blame libESMTP to slow my startup process down but I read that
> this is normal with dialup connections, as sendmail wants to look for
> something on the net. Furthermore I am too lazy to work through all that
> sendmail configuration stuff.

Most likely sendmail is trying to resolve the localhost's name using
DNS lookups. The long delay is probably due to that failing.  IIRC there
is an option or something in sendmail that fixes that.  But I dislike
sendmail (I've seen its source code and it is configured using a language
that looks like modem noise) so I can't help much there.

> Believe me, I would really like to use newest version of balsa but due to
> my MTA problems with libESMTP I can't :-(

To the best of my knowledge, libESMTP is a correct implementation of SMTP
according to RFC 2821 and RFC 2822.  I have tested it against a number of
popular MTAs and used it to transmit thousands of mails over the last
four or five months.  I even used the Balsa patch for about two months
before I made it publicly avaialable.  I doubt libESMTP would fail under
normal circumstances, however more obscure interactions with the server
are less thoroughly tested.  If you have come across one of these, I need
to know the nature of the problem otherwise the bug will persist.

BTW Make sure you are using libESMTP 0.8.1; versions up to 0.8.0 have
an uninitialised variable bug which might prevent the client falling
back from extended SMTP (using the EHLO command) to traditional SMTP
(using the HELO).  This bug was never reported, I found it after
adding some of the more picky compiler warnings the GCC supports.
Nearly all modern MTAs implement SMTP extensions so this bug is unlikely
to strike but you might be a victim.

Hope some of this helps.
Brian Stafford