[I apologize for cross-posting: this thread has been on -newbies but I'm making it a little bit more technical, and I think there are people on -list who might be interested in it.]
Michael Torrie wrote: > As I thought about it, my guess is that evolution is trying to secure > the connection (which email.byu.edu does *not* support) whereas Mozilla > is probably defaulting to no encryption or TLS. Try configuring > Evolution to not secure the connection using SSL or TLS. Wait, TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a form of encryption. It's not SSL, but if BYU's mail server doesn't support encryption at all, you won't be able to use TLS with it. If you're looking for an acronym to describe SMTP authentication, then you want SASL (simple authentication security layer). That's what BYU's mail servers speak. As a somewhat related side note, I'll describe what I finally got working today. I recently started using AT&T DSL, with which I've been pretty happy. However, their outgoing mail server requires SASL+TLS. And they block ports 25 and 465. So that means I have to use their mail server, or none at all, which I think is a good idea (keeps the spammers away), but it makes my mail config a bit of a headache. I got sSMTP so I could send mail from my FreeBSD box to AT&T's mail server -- using SASL+TLS, of course. sSTMP is like a really simple sendmail "smarthost" setup -- all it does is accept local mail and forward it to a real mail server for processing. If you don't need to run a local mail daemon and are smarthosting all your mail to another box, I highly recommend that you just take out sendmail|exim|postfix|qmail and replace it with sSMTP. However, my situation is a little more complex. Apparently Mozilla's SASL+TLS support doesn't like AT&T's setup very much -- a known issue with Mozilla if the server setup is a little buggy, which it almost certainly is (I'm going to debug it later to see exactly where the problem lies so I can report it to Mozilla and AT&T). I also wanted to let my roommates send mail, but without having to give them my username and password to be able to authenticate to AT&T's server. So that meant that I needed some sort of MTA for my local network, and one that could forward to AT&T's servers. But even though all the major MTA's listed above support SASL for clients, I didn't find a way to use it when talking to another mail server. And herein is the hack -- made possible only by Open Source software and the letters PERL. I knew I was going to have to play around with the internals of the delivery system, so exim was going to be my best option because of ease of configuration -- I've messed with sendmail's delivery settings before, and would have rather done very painful things to sensitive parts of my anatomy than do it again. exim's default config is to use its built-in SMTP driver to send remote mail. But fortunately, it was pretty easy to re-write that transport rule to use an external program -- namely, sSMTP -- to deliver mail. I discovered that exim has some annoyances (like re-ordering the command-line options passed to external programs, turning "ssmtp -au username -ap password -t" into "ssmtp -ap -au -t password username", which of course makes sSMTP very unhappy, as well as some funniness with environment variables), but a little perl script took care of all that. The perl script also takes care of the problem of both exim and sSMTP adding headers to the mail message; it just strips off all the headers that exim adds, leaving the bare necessities like To: , From: , Cc: , X-* , Bcc: , so that sSMTP can add the rest. So now I have a vanilla mail server -- open just to the systems on my private subnet -- that relays mail via a secure, authenticated connection to AT&T's master server. The important thing being that now I can send email from Mozilla again, and my roommate can keep using Outlook Express [0]. Happy happy joy joy! If anyone is interested, I'll provide the detailed exim and sSMTP configs and the PERL script. [0] I'm working on him -- he just installed Mozilla because he was sick of popup ads, but hasn't moved his email over yet. -- Soren Harward [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
