Re: Balsa + libESMTP patch

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed,  2 May 16:56 Pawel Salek wrote:

| present SMTP code in balsa works for me most of the time but of course
| it should be replaced by something better in the long term. There is
| no
| question that the internet is more hostile that few years ago and
| supporting for example AUTH is a must, IMO.

I am also in the process of adding experimental support for
STARTTLS.  (Experimental because I'm not up to speed with using
openssl for client side stuff.)

| Releasing it to wider audience is crucial because people have
| sometimes
| totally different setups (different Linux distributions, AIX, Thru64,

Absolutely!  I've got as far as I can go for now with the configurations
I have access to.  I needed to get the patches out or stagnate.

| Sun etc). Brian, on which boxes have you tested your code so far?

Basically just intel based Linux.  (Red Hat 6.2 + various patches
and kernel upgrades.)  Having said that, I've had limited feedback
from folks who have ported to other environments, incl. HP-UX.

I'd be particularly interested in feedback from users of big-endian
architectures.

As far as I'm aware, libESMTP is also being used in a development branch
of slrn but I don't know if this branch has been released in any form
yet.  In short there are no complaints, so either nobody has problems
:-) or nobody uses libESMTP :-(

| > > We have to agree to disagree on this one.  The justification in
| > > RFC 2476 for the use of port 587 for mail submission is good
| enough
| > > for me.
|
| > the justification that *everyone* will have to correct the default
| > setting is good for me.
| 
| This may be a problem because of one more reason: the configuration
| file
| format changes.

Good point.  I wonder if it would be better to have a completely new
variable for the host[:port] notation and synthesise the new format
from the two old ones rather than putting the new format into the
old host variable.

| But I guess we can modify the initialization wizard to
| suggest using port 25 and giving some comments on MSA port 587. Also,
| we
| can alter save-restore.c to read Port entry and append read value to
| the
| host string.

I hadn't thought about the wizard (oops).  But this does raise the
issue of documentation.  At some point I need to write something on
the port 25/587 issue.

| Frankly, I have seen just one host listening to port 587
| (but if we are not on the cutting edge, who will be?)

Same here!

Regards,
Brian Stafford