Forum OpenACS Development: SMTPD

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1: SMTPD
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Has anyone thought about using SMTPD (tcllib) instead of the mailserver itself to deliver mail e.g. from notifications. I have the feeling that this would be considerably smarter to do than to use current method of mailbox delivery and a cronjob to poll for new email, what do you think

http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/doc/smtpd.html

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2: Re: SMTPD (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on
You'd still need to collect the mail at the domains mail exchange and send it to the Tcl SMTPD. I would not recommend replacing your MTA with SMTPD.

Also the doc says

"In short, this code should probably not be used as a permanently running Mail Transfer Agent on an Internet connected server, even though we are careful not to evaluate remote user input. There are many other well tested and security audited programs that can be used as mail servers for internet connected hosts."

So am I not sure which problem you are trying to solve.

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3: Re: SMTPD (response to 2)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
a) If we are using SMTPD we make it easier for developers to deal with incoming email. This is because they do not have to collect the emails from the mailbox folder and process them in a scheduled proc, but right upon delivery you can start off a callback

b) The users do not have to concern themselves with "how do i setup my mailserver so OpenACS gets incoming emails"

c) If all email is handled by this email server we can pretty much disregard anything immediately and setup "root@.." to be forwarded to the system owner (in the case you have a system purely for OpenACS, which is not so uncommon)

So not something large achieveable, but just taking a couple of headaches of people.