Re: [evo-users deadtrout com] Re: [Evolution] outgoing smtp servers

["Terry Ewing" <evo-users deadtrout com>]

I really disagree with the idea of using the MTA on your localhost to do
delivery, especially if it is a laptop.  There is a  reason we hand off mail
to local MTAs who, in-turn, look up and hand them off to the remote MTAs.
In most cases you can contact and deliver to the first MX record, but
infrequently you can run into situations where mail is delayed and then
delivered later.  If you're working from a laptop then you really can't do
this very well.  You may have hit send an hour ago but your laptop may still
have the mail in the queue waiting to deliver.  If you shut your laptop down
and you don't boot it again for a long time, that mail will have effectively
"dissapeared".

I think the ultimate answer for this would be to have the SMTP server
delivered via DHCP.  I know the standard doesn't support it but that's
usually the only missing piece when you get a dhcp lease.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Cowie" <afcowie shadnet shad ca>
To: "Dan Winship" <danw ximian com>
Cc: <evolution ximian com>
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 12:09 AM
Subject: [evo-users deadtrout com] Re: [Evolution] outgoing smtp servers


> 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"
>
>
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