[9fans] The Best way (easiest) of sending E-MAIL in Plan 9.

[9fans] The Best way (easiest) of sending E-MAIL in Plan 9.

[Mats Olsson]

What could be considered to be the best (userfriendliness is of
importance) way of sending e-mail from Plan 9? I haven't cracked that
nut yet although I've gotten a lot of help. Would be very grateful for
your point of view in this matter (especially if it helps me to work
this issue out and leave it behind me). I have a lot to learn about
Plan 9 anyway. It's a very special OS and I just love it! Perfect for
the Raspberry Pi in my opinion.

Kind Regards,
Mats

Re: [9fans] The Best way (easiest) of sending E-MAIL in Plan 9.

[Ingo Krabbe]

basically sending mail in plan9 depends on a command chain that looks a bit different, when you change perspective, but that's common to using any mail system. Of course other mail utilities are much more integrated.

To understand the mail process I recommend the manual pages mail(1), marshal(1), rewrite(6), send(8) and smtp(8). Check the command /mail/lib/qmail, that should handle external mails, based on the results of rewrite.

When you talk about the users point of view, I would recommend the acme Mail command, that is very useful and simple to use. But problems shouldn't rise from using acme, as its a very simple interface. It's more likely that you have a problem with the mailhub configuration.

If you want to debug the process of sending mail, check some /sys/log/ files (smtp.fail, smtp, mail).

Actually as smtp is called the "Simple" mail transport protocol, it's really simple to use a mailhub's smtp service through telnet — check rfc821 to see how to and remeber to end your lines with crnl, when communicating with a smtp service directly.

That's what the command smtp(8) is for: The communication with another smtp service.

I found it most challenging in plan9 to configure the /lib/ndb/local, but finally it reduced to define the local ipnet (the plan9 machine lives in) and set the smtp value to the mailhub's ip for that network.

regards
ingo

> What could be considered to be the best (userfriendliness is of
> importance) way of sending e-mail from Plan 9? I haven't cracked that
> nut yet although I've gotten a lot of help. Would be very grateful for
> your point of view in this matter (especially if it helps me to work
> this issue out and leave it behind me). I have a lot to learn about
> Plan 9 anyway. It's a very special OS and I just love it! Perfect for
> the Raspberry Pi in my opinion.
> 
> Kind Regards,
> Mats