how do you do smtp?

Chip Rosenthal chip at vector.Dallas.TX.US
Sun Apr 16 14:43:26 AEST 1989


I have Excelan's "Lan Workplace for 386 XENIX", and am not entirely happy
with the smtp implementation.  The problem is that their smtp is very
tightly coupled with SCO's mail system, and it doesn't look like it
integrates very cleanly with anything else.  To make matters even more
confusing, I don't use SCO's mail software.  I've even modified "smail"
to install as /usr/lib/mail/execmail.

Does anybody have a stand-alone smtp daemon, or do I need to run full
blown sendmail?  Does anybody have sendmail running under XENIX with
Excelan's TCP/IP libraries?

My current kludge is that I've modified smail to check if argv[0] is
"..execmail" or "execmail".  If so, I strip recipients like "exos:CHIP"
down to "chip", and then just process as usual.

The sending end is a lot more cumbersome.  I added a path entry saying:

	dsceng	%s%%dsceng	0

this translates "rosenthal at dsceng" to "rosenthal%dsceng", which looks
like a local address.  So smail passes it off "deliver", the local
delivery agent, and my deliver control file says:

	(
	    sed -e 's/^From:.*<\(.*\).Dallas.TX.US>/From: \1/' $HEADER
	    cat $BODY
	) | $smtp_deliver dsceng "$SENDER" `expr "$user" : "\(.*\)%dsceng"`

where "$smtp_deliver" is the "mail.cln" distributed by Excelan.  I know
this is going to break the next time I rebuild my paths file and forget
to hack in the local smtp sites.

The problem with programs as flexible as "deliver" is that people
invariable use this flexability to do this sort of ugliness :-)

(Anybody know if the any-day-now smail release will support smtp?)
-- 
Chip Rosenthal / chip at vector.Dallas.TX.US / Dallas Semiconductor / 214-450-5337



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