[Mailman-Developers] an opinion about using port 25

[Gergely Madarasz]

On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:

> The change is in the way that Mailman passes messages to the *local* MTA
> - it uses SMTP instead of execing the MTA program.  This falls far, far
> short of the general problem of delivery to a general host out on the
> net. The local MTA still handles all the challenges of getting the
> messages to the remote site!
> 
> There are a few significant benefits to this change.  Directly contrary
> to Scott's next point, this drastically reduces portability burdens,
> because Mailman doesn't need to know *anything* about the specific MTA
> the local host is running, except that it obeys SMTP. 

As I said in one of my previous postings... sendmail can be called from
the command line to talk SMTP just like as connected to port 25 
(sendmail -bs). I expect most other MTA's have the same features, with
perhaps a bit different command line. So the only difference between using
a local MTA and connecting to port 25 would be to open a two way pipe to
'sendmail -bs' or whatever (all sendmail-compatible mta-s, like exim or
smail should have sendmail -bs) instead of connecting to port 25. All the
rest is the same. So the only change needed here would be in the connect
function of smtplib -> not a mailman issue but a python issue :) 
This would be much-much nicer than mailman trying to queue mails.

Greg

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Madarasz Gergely           gorgo@caesar.elte.hu         gorgo@linux.rulez.org
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