trouble with smtp and gnus

[Christopher Tessone <tessone@polyglut.net>]

Hi folks,

Due to some idiocy involve my MTA, I can no longer rely on sendmail on
my local machine.  Therefore, I set out to make Gnus send email via
SMTP.  There are problems.

I have followed every recipe I can find on the net, all of which
involve combinations of loading smtpmail, setting various variables,
and setting send-mail-function and message-send-mail-function to
smtpmail-send-it.  Here is one such recipe I found:

;;
;; Want to use smtp instead of sendmail.
;;
(setq send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
(defvar smtpmail-default-smtp-server "mail")
(defvar smtpmail-smtp-service "smtp")
(defvar smtpmail-local-domain "my.domain.com")
(defvar smtpmail-debug-info t)
(load-library "smtpmail")
(defvar smtpmail-code-conv-from nil)
(defvar user-full-name "Donald Hunter")
(setq user-mail-address "dhunter@my.domain.com")

;;
;; Want to use message.el instead of mail.el
;;
(define-key global-map [(control x) m] 'message-mail)
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)

The problem is, this doesn't work if I kill sendmail on my machine.
Instead, messages I send get queued in /var/spool/clientmqueue and are
not sent until I start up sendmail again.  This leads me to believe
Gnus is completely ignoring me and using sendmail anyway.

Does anyone have any insight?  Please help!

For reference, I'm running Gnus 5.10.2 under XEmacs 21.4p2 on
YellowDog Linux 3.0.  SuperCite and BBDB are enabled on my Gnus run,
and I can generate debugging information if it's necessary and someone
tells me how.

Cheers,
Chris

-- 
Christopher A. Tessone
Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois
BA Student, Russian and Mathematics
http://www.polyglut.net/