I know many of you have heard of Alfredo Cole's mail transport
program smtpop (last known version smtpop12.exe). It is a fast
mail transport program that receives pop3 mail and sends off
smtp mail through your mail server. It may be unique in letting you
pick one of several mail servers, where you want mail to be fetched from,
or sent out through.
Equally well known is that many have had problems making this program
send out mail. I thought I would share a few tips that might salvage
the use of this program, for those would like to use it but cant get
it to ``go''.
Many realize that, smtpop only sends out mail, one file per message,
where each message has a header in the ``glue'' format, used by
Pegasus mail. In fact, smtpop was written as an adjunct to Pegasus mail.
If you use Pegasus, glue headers are no problem. If you dont (e.g.,
you use insight), you can use a text processing program like awk or
perl to convert ordinary headers to glue headers. However - - -
TIP ONE: There is a time saving program called, glue.exe, written by
the author of Pegasus, David Harris, that converts ordinary
usenet headers into glue headers for you. It is part of David's
own mail transport package:
http://www.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/mailnews/pmpop110.zip
TIP TWO: If your outgoing mail is in Soup or Yarn format, and has
many messages in one file, you must remove the Soup/Yarn headers
and split one file into many files, each containing one message.
There is another time saving program that can do this:
Part of the uka_ppp internet package is a program called x_spool.exe.
It breaks yarn/soup messages all in one file, into one message
per file, with each message in the ordinary text header format (which
can then be processed by glue.exe).
TIP THREE: smtpop reads the wattcp.cfg file to get basic internet
settings for sending and receiving mail. Some applications look
for this file, using the path that the Dos variable, smtpop.cfg, is
set to. Others insist this file is in the same directory is the
mail program itself (i.e., as smtpop). Smtpop is one of the latter
programs.
If you do not like to waste disk space with 6 or 7 identical copies of
the same file, such as wattcp.cfg., despair not. There is an
interesting little TSR program called: doslnk10.zip that allows you to
create Unix type ``links'' between a file and other directories.
Programs can read the link for a file, as if the actual file were in the
directory that has the link. I will soon send this program to Rich
Green's ``Freeware for Dos, not Windows'' so you can grab it there.
TIP FOUR: smtpop asks you to enter each of your mail servers in
a form like this:
Server : mail.isp.com
User ID : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Password : password
Action : S
Delete Mail? : Y
Drive : C
Mail Dir. : \OUTBOX\SPOOL
Full Name : John Brown
Save Delete Cancel Other List Print
The instructions for filling out this form are a little vague, and in
one case (I think) in error. You are told to enter your user name only
(letters to the left of the @ sign) for ``User ID:''. I found I had
to enter my full internet address in this field, or smtpop would not
communicate properly with my smtp mail server. Also, one might be
tempted to enter, for instance, C:\OUTBOX\SPOOL for the path of the
``Mail Dir:''. This will not work. smtpop requires that you give the
logical drive letter for this path in the separate field ``Drive:',
then enter the path WITHOUT a drive letter starting with the backslash
character \, and ending with a directory name followed by no backslash
character (!).. Thus the path above is given as: \outbox\spool
TIP FIVE: smtpop has the unfortunate habit of displaying the messages,
``sending message'' and ``mail sent'' whether it succeeded in contacting
the mail server and sending mail or not. In fact, it will even delete
your mail messages, when it failed to successfully hand off your mail to
the smtp server.
How then to tell if the mail actually got sent? Alas the most reliable
method I have found is visual inspection: to:watch its dialogue screen
which includes messages``sent'' and ``received'' rows. If you see
numbers, (representing bytes of mail sent) displayed on the screen,
chances are excellent the mail really got sent. Note however -- that
smtpop12 does not work like a dos ``for'' loop: It will try to
send off messages, one file at a time. The first time it finds a
message/file it can not send, it exits. It does not try to send the
remaining messages/files, and simply report the (perhaps) one file it
could not send.
It would be optimal if smtpop12 exited with an errorlevel code that
told you if it sent mail successfully, yes? In fact Mr. Cole wrote
wrote a send only program called, sendmail.exe, that gives different
exit codes for different types of errors. Not so with smtpop12. If
you get anything you get an errorlevel of 1, if something went wrong.
Most of the time this works, but not always!
If you want to see smtpop12 behave badly in about 3 ways at once,
remove the glue equivalent of the ``From '' line within a message
(e.g., remove the first line, $$ [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Now
tell smtpop12 to send this message. It will say ``sending message''
``mail sent'' etc.; it will exit with an errorlevel of 0; but (obviously)
it will not send the message.
With all this in place, smtpop12 works reasonably well for me. Hope this
long exposition hopes it do so for another.
long exposition hopes it do so for another.
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