Re: Gnus with Exim

["Steven E. Harris" <seh@panix.com>]

David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> writes:

[...]

> I'm wondering what the most effective way of dealing with this is.
> It seems kinda silly that a notice can fail to be delivered *to me*
> by an exim running on this machine, and the messages will get thrown
> out eventually!

When you say "to me", do you mean to you as your local account on that
computer, or to you as a remote account such as boost-consulting.com?
Seeing the log messages below, I think you mean the latter, though it
is worth noting that exim may have also sent some delay or failure
warnings to your /local/ account. That would depend on whether exim
thinks the message originated from a local account.

> Oh, look:

[...]

> Is not helping because it reaches smtp.rcn.com, but then that server
> asks for authentication!  AFAIK there's no authentication I can
> actually give it that will work from outside my cable modem, and it
> forbids authentication from behind my cable modem :(

Have you tried specifying authentication credentials for rcn.com in
your exim.conf, but not citing their use as mandatory? You may recall
that earlier on our discussion we looked at the hosts_try_auth¹ and
hosts_require_tls² options for the remote_smtp transport. Perhaps you
can include rcn.com in a hosts_try_auth option but not include the TLS
stipulation:

,----[ Augmented transport ]
| remote_smtp:
|   driver = smtp
|   hosts_try_auth = smtp.rcn.com
`----

Later in the authenticators section, you'd need to specify one or two
credentials using LOGIN or PLAIN authentication:

,----[ Authenticators ]
| begin authenticators
| 
| fixed_login:
|   driver = plaintext
|   public_name = LOGIN
|   client_send = : dave : password
| 
| 
| fixed_plain:
|   driver = plaintext
|   public_name = PLAIN
|   client_send = ^dave^password
`----

Here we just cite the user name and password as global. It's probably
possible to make them host-specific, but I don't have an example on
hand.

> This is a little discouraging!  Got any sage words for me?

What a nice surprise to come home to. Can you try the suggestions
above from outside your cable modem connection and report back?


Footnotes: 
¹ http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.50/doc/html/spec_30.html#IX2239
² http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.50/doc/html/spec_30.html#IX2236

-- 
Steven E. Harris