Re: Mutt Next Generation
On Thursday, 27 January 2005 at 01:12, Paul Walker wrote:
> * speaks SMTP (+ AUTH)
> * speaks TLS/SSL
> * accepts mail from the command line
> * simple config file.
> * er... options compatible with sendmail, maybe?
>
> For example, what was wrong with the ones you evaluated previously? (I think
> it was you mentioned this upthread, anyway.)
It wasn't me. I did have a look at several of them some time ago, but
they may have improved since then. I certainly didn't like the idea of
passing along credentials on the command line or through a config
file, and at the time nothing supported GSS (my preferred
authentication mechanism).
My current set-up is postfix submitting my mail to an upstream relay
using its own account. Obviously this isn't a practical solution on a
multi-user machine, since postfix would have to authenticate on behalf
of every user that submits mail. And I think in general, there are two
types of users: those who can use a full sendmail/postfix/exim server,
or have one configured for them, and those who have to make do with
some sort of nullmailer application.
I would argue that sendmail/postfix/exim do a great job of queue
management, but users who want mutt to do SMTP want it because for one
reason or another they can't use a real MTA (eg, per-user auth, as
above). This means that they are using some simple client with
probably poor queue management facilities, and few advantages over a
built-in agent aside from the "do the least you can get away with"
philosophical advantage.
And much of the needed code is already in mutt.