SMTP via pipes?

[Henning Schroeder]

Hello,
I have some users who don't have a local SMTP server running although 
sendmail is available. All mail has to be sent via pipes. When you
call sendmail with the -bs parameter you can talk to sendmail like you are
connected to a smtp-server. So thought I write the below attached
wrapper. Unfortunately it doesn't run :-(
Can anybody help or give any hints how pipes behave and why it doesn't
work that way? Your help is very appreciated.

Henning



# Module pipesmtp.py

import smtplib
from popen2 import popen2

SENDMAIL = "/usr/lib/sendmail -bs"


class SocketDummy:

    def __init__(self, file):
	self.file = file
	self.send = self.file.write
	self.close = self.file.close

	
class FileDummy:
   
    def __init__(self, input, output):
	self.ifile = input
	self.ofile = output
	self.read = self.ifile.read
	self.readline = self.ifile.readline
	self.write = self.ofile.write

    def close(self):
	self.ifile.close()
	self.ofile.close()

	
class SMTP(smtplib.SMTP):
    
    def connect(self, host="doesnt_matter", port=0):
	r, w = popen2(SENDMAIL)
	self.file = FileDummy(r, w)
	self.sock = SocketDummy(self.file)
	(code, msg) = self.getreply()
        if self.debuglevel > 0 : print "connect:", msg
        return (code, msg)

    

if __name__ == "__main__":
    s = SMTP()
    print s.connect()  # this works
    print s.help()     # here it hangs
    print s.quit()