Re: [Evolution] outgoing smtp servers

[Andrew Cowie <afcowie shadnet shad ca>]

On 23 Feb 2001 00:25:57 +0500, Dan Winship wrote:
> OK, so, some people have to deal with SMTP servers that only allow
> certain "From" addresses through, and other people have to deal with
> SMTP servers that only allow mail from local IPs through. Blah. I'll
> ponder.


Just for everyone's consideration, I've another way of approaching this
problem that you may be interested in.

I'm a laptop user; the issue of having to have an smtp server specific
to each ISP I was connecting to as I voyage from one side of the pond to
the other was driving me nuts for years. There's also the factor that I
don't just use a single MTA (pine at the time) to send mail; I also fire
stuff off of the command line (good old `mail -s "blah"
soinso somewhere ca < file.txt`); indeed it wasn't just that I had to
change my smtp target all the time, but that I wanted to do so in some
scriptable automatable way.

I ended up dealing with this by setting up an MTA on my laptop, and then
using my setlocale scripts (that I run manually on startup - it's not
just travel but also am I docked at home or undocked at work, etc) with
an argument saying what combination of Networking, PCMCIA, X Config,
Printer, and, relevent to this discussion, what smtp host I want. 

After much casting about., I ended up selecting exim (the Caimbridge
University MTA, installed as packaged by Debian) as it run-based as
opposed to daemon based and doesn't freak out if it isn't connected to
the internet at the moment that it trys to deliver mail; it has the
usual back-off algorithms, but you can force delivery so it works pretty
nicely after I finally get off an airplane and connect.

exim's conf file has a certain way of being configured in which you tell
it what the smarthost is you're going to relay to (in essence, making it
a store-and-forward, so as opposed to trying to execute all the
deliveries by itself, I just ship my mail off to whichever smtp server
is appropriate and let them deal with the target MX being there or not).
My setlocale scripts just search and replace the relevent line of the
config file, and ta da.

So, in the case of pine, Evolution, or anything else, I just tell it
that my smtp server is "localhost" and I'm done. There's probably a
simpler way of doing it, but it's working for me and I'm pretty happy.
[Oh, for inbound at present I'm still using fetchmail, and using
procmail to carbon copy inbound to an mbox which I let evo suck out of]

Gotta tell you - if someone wrote a dirt simple MTA which just did this
piece of functionality (local user mbox delivery inbound and
location/network/ISP configurable smtp-smarthost delivery outbound) and
nothing else I'd be pretty thrilled.

[Just out of curiousity, should I be telling evo "SMTP" or "SendMail" in
the configs?]

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Director of Operations
Upoc, Inc

afcowie upoc-inc com
mobile: +1-917-217-4578

"Order; counterorder; disorder"