Thus spake Sam Varshavchik on Thu, May 13, 2004 at 08:57:14PM CDT
> First of all, why is Squirrelmail messing around with SMTP in the first 
> place?  It should be submitting all mail by running the sendmail command 
> line wrapper.

It has the option to do either one, apparently.  Just checked.  I had it
configured to talk smtp to the mailhost.
 
> >                                 ssmtp likewise aborts.
> 
> It's broken.

It's only a minimal tool, basically a sendmail client for something like a
desktop system so that one can use clients such as mutt which expects to
send using a sendmail workalike of some sort.

Lots of mail clients talk smtp, though, and many use _only_ a smtp dialog
with a designated mailhost to move email.  Some, such as squirrelmail and
evolution have the option to use either a sendmail workalike or to talk smtp
with a designanted smtp server.  These clients won't get past the first
failure.  They don't queue, they won't retry, they'll just abort the dialog
and kick the error back to the user.  It's one thing if the corresponding
system is something like courier, qmail, postfix, whatever that can actually
queue and retry, but the 'first mile' on smtp traffic is more often managed
on the requesting end by a "stupid mail client".

> Because they are nothing but stupid mail clients, and lack that anything 
> resembles a mail queue.

Yes, but real world applications that people need to use email can't all
behave like full-fledged smtp servers, and in fact very few of them do. 
Nonetheless, we wouldn't be able to use email these days without them.

> Now, one change that can be made is to disable all filtering completely if 
> RELAYCLIENT is set.  This is going to disable all content filtering for all 
> senders with relaying privileges.  I'm just not sure if we want to do that.

Using a maildrop filter to look at TCPREMOTEIP and whitelist the same IPs
set with RELAYCLIENT accomplishes the same thing, and it's what I've done
here, and it appears to work quite well.

The only other option that I think would be useful, and in fact necessary,
would be to be able to disable filtering completely if the system requesting
service is using authenticated SMTP.  This is really a road-warrior issue,
since if I have my laptop configured to use authenticating smtp to my mail
server, I could be coming in from just about any IP address, so switching
filtering on or off based on IP address isn't an option.

-- 
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FMP Computer Services |       if you let it" |      available at
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