Re: smtpmail failure

[Stephen Berman <Stephen.Berman@gmx.net>]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:20:47 -0500 Dave Goldberg <david.goldberg6@verizon.net> wrote:

>>>>>> On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:37:14 +0100, Stephen Berman <Stephen.Berman@gmx.net> said:
>
>> On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:47:59 +0100 Stephen Berman <Stephen.Berman@gmx.net> wrote:
>>> With one of my email accounts I've been unable to send mail using Gnus
>> [...]
>>> with KMail I
>>> can send mail from this account.  KMail has a configuration function
>>> that check what kind of authentification the server supports, and for
>>> this account it says the server supports SSL encryption and either LOGIN
>>> or PLAIN authentification, and it changes the port from 25 to 465.
>>> Since the smptmail manual says LOGIN authentification is supported, and
>>> since it works with KMail, I do not understand why it fails with Gnus.
>>> Have I failed to set a necessary variable?  Is there another way to send
>>> mail with Gnus via an SMTP server?  I would be grateful for any help.
>
>> Does nobody have an idea why smptmail fails?  Or any suggestions about
>> how I could try to track down the source of the failure?  I would rather
>> use Gnus than KMail.
>
> It appears that your mail server wants to use SSL.  The smtpmail.el in
> XEmacs appears to support this provided you have an external program
> (starttls) available.  My own mail server doesn't do it so I have
> nothing to test with.  I suggest taking a look through your
> smtpmail.el and see what you need to do to support SSL and trying
> that.

Thanks.  My smptmail manual also refers to starttls but says gnutls-cli
is preferred, and the latter is installed on my system.  Following the
manual I set smtpmail-starttls-credentials to '(("mail.myprovider.com"
465 nil nil)) and also set smtpmail-smtp-service to 465, and when I
tried sending the email, I got the message "Opening STARTTLS connection
to `mail.myprovider.com'...done" and in the *trace of SMTP session to
mail.myprovider.com* buffer: 
Resolving 'mail.myprovider.com'...
Connecting to '123.456.78:465' (the mail server's IP number and port)
but then, as before, Emacs hung up for 20 minutes and then returned the
message: "smtpmail-send-command: Process SMTP not running" and in the
*trace of SMTP session to mail.myprovider.com* buffer: 
Process SMTP finished
454 TLS connection failed: timed out (#4.3.0) 
- Peer has closed the GNUTLS connection
QUIT 

Any other ideas why it is failing?  (Again, it works with KMail.)

Steve Berman