Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!chinacat!chip From: chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Using SMTP and smail Message-ID: <1588@chinacat.Unicom.COM> Date: 23 Sep 90 15:13:54 GMT References: <1808@utoday.UUCP> Organization: Unicom Systems Development, Austin, TX Lines: 38 In article <1808@utoday.UUCP> sean@utoday.UUCP (Sean Fulton) writes: >I think I recently read that smail 2.5 was suitable for UUCP mail, but >that to run smail using SMTP I would need smail3.19 (with smail 3.2 not >available yet). The problem is that smail 2.5 does not have any delivery support - it needs to pass of the message to another program to perform the actual delivery. I guess a second problem is that smail 2.5 makes the naive assumption that there are only two delivery channels: uucp and local. None the less, if you've got a program which will do the delivery, you can still use smail2.5. For example, when I was running the Excelan LAN Workplace under XENIX, I was able to wedge their crufty SMTP into smail. The key to this was using Chip Salzenberg's "deliver" program (available at finer archives everywhere). The trick was to use a little-known feature of pathalias, which allows you to put a network character (e.g. ``%'') into the routing data to get something other than the default bang path. Smail assumes that a bang path should go to the uucp delivery agent (i.e. uux) and everything else goes to the local delivery agent (in my case, deliver). I then trained deliver to pass ``%'' messages off to SMTP (a simple matter of shell programming). Some things have changed since that time. i.e. my smail2.5 is now trained to handle ``%'' addresses, and deliver can be used as smail's uucp delivery agent as well as the local delivery agent. Just the same, the number of wonderfully perverse things you can do with smail2.5 and deliver are mind boggling. With all that said and done, whenever I get the network up and running here, I probably won't repeat the above approach. I'll probably bring up smail3 and use it's SMTP capabiilty. -- Chip Rosenthal Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260 Our motto is: We never say, "But it works with DOS."