sendmail_wait and ssmtp
Hi, I recently discovered something about the use of "sendmail_wait" with
ssmtp and wanted to share that with the Mutt community.
My computer uses ssmtp as the MTA and forwards all my email to an external
relay. (snark mode on) I use DreamHost as the relay, which means that the
external relay isn't always available. (snark mode off - they've had a lot
of downtime lately)
I had sendmail_wait set to 10, probably from an earlier time when I used
sendmail instead of ssmtp. What I found was that after ten seconds, Mutt
would tell me it was sending in the background, but instead ssmtp would
silently putting the message into dead.letter - there was no background
attempt nor any message to the user indicating that the send failed.
Looking at ssmtp's man page, there's no support for background delivery,
so this is clearly a misconfiguration on my part. With sendmail_wait
set to 0 it behaves in a sane manner no matter if the external relay is
up or down.
I'm thinking it would be nice to have a comment in the stock .muttrc
for the "sendmail_wait" variable, to the effect of: "if you are using
a mail transport agent other than sendmail which does not support
background delivery (e.g. ssmtp, ...), you do not want to set this
variable to a value other than zero."
I'm currently using Mutt 1.4.2.1i under Cygwin. It is also entirely
possible that this is Cygwin-specific behavior, but I no longer have
access to a *nix box to double check this.
By the way, on the mailing lists page:
http://www.mutt.org/mail-lists.html
there is an option to subscribe to the "Digest of Mutt Users".
When I tried to subscribe to that via the web page, majordomo
told me that no such list existed.
My thanks to the Mutt team for a wonderful mail client.
Thanks & best regards,
Kevin Rolfes