Re: [Evolution] SMTP and MX

[Kenneth Porter <shiva well com>]

On Wed, 2002-05-29 at 06:24, Dan Winship wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-05-29 at 07:12, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> > I was idly curious about how Evo resolved an SMTP server. Does it use MX
> > resolution, or just the address from the A record?
>
> Just the A record. Using the MX record would be wrong; MX is to answer
> the question "how do I deliver mail to someone in the domain 'foo.com'".
> It's possible that the server that the MX record leads you to will only
> accept mail addressed to local recipients.

Ok, that makes sense.

I initially thought of the question when I was thinking about how to
create a backup submission server. MX records do this for transmission,
but one would need some other mechanism, such as SRV records or a local
MUA configuration to set a backup submission server.

Fortunately this isn't a big issue for Evo, as it runs on a platform
that sendmail runs easily on, and one can queue mail locally with
sendmail until the real submission server comes back up. I wonder if any
MUA writers in the Windows world have worried about this?

> > Are there any plans
> > to use sendmail's MSA (mail submission agent) port?
>
> Not currently. The Internet Draft that that's based on has expired
> anyway... You can override the port yourself though by specifying
> "smtp.foo.com:587" as the hostname in the mail config dialog.

I asked because I saw the MSA stuff show up in sendmail not all that
long ago, and don't recall seeing any clients that take advantage of it.

It didn't occur to me to assume that the :port syntax would work. I
wonder if there's some way to hint at this in the configuration dialog,
like using "hostname[:port]" as the prompt? Why did you go with this
syntax instead of just providing a separate entryfield for the port?