On Sun, Aug 05, 2012 at 01:01:10AM +0200, Rado Q wrote: > > > Using built-in SMTP-client or a standalone SMTP-client doesn't > > > make a difference for the ISP, it can't tell what software > > > executes the SMTP. > > > > No, but it makes a difference to the USER. Mutt is already hard to > > configure. If you have to configure sendmail to talk SMTP on the > > MSP port, enable STARTTLS, pop-before-smtp, etc. you need to learn > > a lot about sendmail. No one should need to do that just to be > > able to send an e-mail. > > Why not?
For the same reason one should not need to become a doctor to use a human body. It's superfluous, for the overwhelming majority of users. Learning how to use your body (or e-mail client), on the other hand, is very much relevant, and along the way you will likely pick up some basic knowledge of medicine (or mail transport), on those occasions when things go wrong; but for the day-to-day use of your body (or e-mail client), it's completely and utterly superfluous. And that's as it should be. And if things never go wrong, you'll never need that info. Now, YOU may happen to find it interesting, and if you do, by all means go off and learn about it. But by all means, leave the rest of us alone. ;-) > Back to your previous comment: > independent of the spammers the "how to use" hasn't changed, they > didn't make it harder to establish the standard setup. > I'm talking about the qualification required for that which hasn't > changed, not the ability to setup half-baked open-relays which then > are denied by the ISPs. This isn't my comment... Maybe you do not know as much about e-mail as you think you do. =8^) I'm teasing here, but there's a pont here: knowing the basics of how STMP works is really irrelevant to the average user, and is not really helpful in any way to make them better at reading and writing e-mail -- which, let's be clear, is what their goal is. That is why people use Mutt... NOT so that they can learn about obscure networking protocols. All they need to know is how to configure their e-mail client to talk to their ISP's mail gateway. If you think that Mutt has no users that want all the power of Mutt for sending and reading e-mail, but don't want to learn about computers or networking generally, you're mistaken. Obviously it's not the norm, but as someone who's been on this list for a very long time, I can tell you that we have occasionally seen posts from such people. > > I happen to know a lot about e-mail, since I needed to in order to > > do my job; but if that weren't the case, I wouldn't care one bit > > about how it all works. > > And that's wrong... You're making a judgement about what should be important to all Mutt users. Who are you to judge? Life presents its own priorities... > did it hurt you to know something more than how to push > "send"-button? YES. It took away time that I could be using to do something more interesting or important. Were I not a sysadmin for many years, spending time to learn about how mail transport works would have been a complete waste of my time. So in that sense, yes, absolutely, it does hurt. *How much* it hurts is a judgement to be made by each individual user. If you can't see that, then continuing to discuss this is also a complete waste of time. :) > (if I only had the time... and nothing else more urgent to do) Yeah exactly! You DO get why requiring a user to learn about SMTP is bad, after all. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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