Re: Gnus with Exim

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

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

> I don't care *too* much how long long it takes as long as it's going
> on in the background.

I thought you might care because you seemed picky about running exim
as a daemon, suggesting that you're suspicious of any spurious wasting
of resources. I just wanted to make sure you understood the difference
between the smarthost and dnslookup routers.

> Cool, telnet works from here.  I'll try sending you this message on
> that port.

[...]

> Heh, that was my Bcc: to myself.  I guess it won't let me send to
> anyone outside Panix unless I can login there?

I think it was just being lazy in reporting that authentication is
required for any transaction. As far as I know, you need to login with
a valid Panix account in order to be able to send a message to anyone.

> Yeah, but if it's responsive enough, I don't care much.

Wait, now I'm confused. Are you suggesting that sending messages out
from your MUA directly to some server of your choice /is/ responsive
enough? I thought we started out with you saying that this direct
sending often caused your MUA to hang, and that's where the idea came
up of sticking an asynchronous sending, possibly queuing MTA in
between.

> What am I missing?

If you take exim out of the picture, your MUA must talk directly to
the remote SMTP server, which may cause annoying delays.

> Hum, you mean I'd need a Panix username and password?

Yes.

> I'm not always stuck there. When I roam, won't I want that in
> effect?

That depends on whether the connections you roam to allow SMTP
traffic. Most cafes I've been to block port 25, assuming for some
reason that the whole world is satisfied with Web mail. If the normal
SMTP port is blocked, the dnslookup router will always try and fail,
and only then get around to your fallback alternates.

-- 
Steven E. Harris