fun with SMTP

By anders pearson 30 Oct 2003

my email has been flakey lately. in particular, i was noticing that often, stuff sent from work, going through columbia’s <acronym title=”Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”>SMTP</acronym> server, was disappearing into the void.

finally i started looking at my mail logs and noticed that columbia was rejecting messages. so i poke around on the website and notice that they’ve started <a href=”http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/authsmtp/“>requiring authentication</a> for sending to addresses outside columbia.edu. argh. i use mutt, which doesn’t do any of the SMTP stuff itself, in true unix fashion, it expects another dedicated <acronym title=”Mail Transport Agent”>MTA</acronym> to do the work for it. i’ve used sSMTP for that since it is extremely small, fast, and doesn’t do anything fancy that i don’t need it to do. unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to support authenticated SMTP. i even followed <a href=”http://people.ac.upc.es/aramirez/mutt.html”>these instructions</a>, but it still was a no go.

so i’ve gotten rid of sSMTP and replaced it with <a href=”http://www.postfix.org/“>postfix</a> and now it seems to work. i’m not totally happy because postfix is a relatively large program and does far more than i really need it to. i prefer simplicity when possible.

i guess now the next step is to start grepping my logs to try to figure out which of the messages i thought i sent actually vanished off into the abyss, try to find copies in my sent-mail folder and resend then if they were important.

anyway, if you sent me email in the last couple months and never got a reply, this may be why.

(weird though, according to columbia’s docs, <em>none</em> of the emails sent through columbia’s SMTP server to outside addresses should have gotten through, but i know that some did.)

Tags: email postfix authenticated smtp