On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 01:21:44PM +0200, Christian Surchi wrote: > Il sab, 2004-10-09 alle 17:48, martin f krafft ha scritto: > > > I think it's not a right comparison, nullmail is an MTA. and > > > AFAIK, msmtp is not an MTA: > > > > it transports mail to the next relay, right? > > nullmailer is a "simple relay-only mail transport agent." > > > > what's the difference? > > Deep difference. Our mail-transport-agents are able to behave as daemon, > listening on 25 port.
This is not true, since not required by policy. Policy says: 11.6. Mail transport, delivery and user agents | (...) the interface to send a mail message is `/usr/sbin/sendmail' (as | per the FHS). /usr/sbin/sendmail is guaranteed to work if you have mail-transport-agent, but port 25 to localhost isn't. So, any package providing /usr/sbin/sendmail, and, when correctly configured, gets mail on that interface off to the recipient, _is_ a mail-transport-agent, MTA. ssmtp is one, nullmailer is also one. Note that a MTA isn't required to know ANYTHING about smtp. Suppose a package provides an sendmail that is an alias for 'ssh mailhub /usr/sbin/sendmail', then that package is a MTA. > msmtp doesn't, and it's the same for nail. Do you think that nail > could be an MTA? Do you think that any evolution of mail(1) could be > seen as an MTA, only because is able to "speak" smtp? > :o mail currently is a MUA, it will communicate with sendmail, i.e., require a MTA to get its mail off. > > > I think that msmtp simply will take the place of sendmail binary > > > called by mutt. Then msmtp is just like any MTA, but accepts mail on a different binary (the msmtp binary in stead of sendmail), so it won't be used by any program unless specificially configured. IMHO, it'd be better if mstmp were packaged as a real MTA, providing /usr/sbin/sendmail, so that ALL programs (and not only mutt) can take advantage of it, and don't need special configuration. Then msmtp is an alternative to ssmtp and nullmailer, with a different featureset. --Jeroen -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar [EMAIL PROTECTED] (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl