Hi Sam, on 28.03.02, 07:59 you wrote:
>>> But if you can't download your mail on mail.myrealbox.com, you >>> shouldn't be able to send anything via smtp.myrealbox.com, or is >>> this possible with Nettamer? > Regardless of whatever email client software you use, it would be > impossible to send anything through "smtp.myrealbox.com" without > logging onto the pop3 server first. Pop before smtp is a common > authentication protocol used for many email services. Err, sorry, but - no... ;-) "SMTP after POP" is not the only authentication method for email services, but a common and well known one, that's true. In the meantime many freemailers (and Myrealbox, too, as far as I know) offer another more sophisticated method to identify yourself before the mail upload called SMTP_AUTH. It works like the POP3 authentication which means that you have to send your username/password combination first before you can send the mail. So both the client and the server must know this Enhanced SMTP (ESMTP) method. Sometimes it's possible or even a "must" to use an encoded username and password, for example with base64, but this is not the common method which simply uses plain ASCII. So with my question I wanted to find out if Nettamer perhaps can already use SMTP_AUTH which Arachne (and my mail/news client UKA_PPP) can't. >> With my local ISP a new install of Nettamer will always let me send >> SMTP but not download POP3 until I have sent a few emails out. Until >> then I get an 'err invalid password' or something like that, I >> hav'nt used it in a while. When I finally get a load going I >> compress it with LHA, then if I need to reload, the file with the >> cookie or whatever is ready to go right away. Maybe myrealbox.com >> works the same way with Nettamer. > No, you got it bass ackwards. At "myrealbox.com" you must do pop > before smtp, regardless of whatever email client software you use. > I have never heard of any email service anywhere that would have > you to do it the other way around. That wouldn't make sense. One advantage of SMTP_AUTH is that you don't have to call the POP3 server first if you just want to send an important mail right away. Another important plus is the possibility to use any mail address you like in the "To:"-header which is quite comfortable if you use different addresses from different locations like from your work or from your home, and this even with different ISPs. The main reason for implementing this new authentication method into SMTP was a better protection against spam, though, because nobody can steal your mail address and send spam with it through your SMTP server anymore, because he doesn't know your password. ZZee ya, Hans-J�rgen
