On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 05:35:08AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
| On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:14:42 -0700
| Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca> wrote:
| > Because it's pointless and un-necissary to impliment the better part
| > of an MTA into an MUA.
|
| Which is why you don't do that. Smarthost doesn't need a full blown MTA
| to do it. This is smarthost behavior. Here are the steps involved:
|
| Lookup DNS
| Connect
| Process
|
| That doesn't look like an MTA to me.
As Martin points out, the "Process" step you listed is a concise way
of describing the job of an MTA. The details of "Process" are defined
in RFC 821, superseded by RFC 2821. Reading discussions between mail
server admins on a few different lists reveals that many MUAs don't
properly (or even *reasoanbly*) handle most of the potential error
conditions that can arise while trying to send a message.
On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 06:59:23AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
| Also looks like IMAP, POP, HTTP, FTP... Amazing that those clients
| can communicate with the server, eh? I don't see anyone here saying
| they are trying to me daemons.
The difference is that a MUA is _supposed_ to implement IMAP, and it
implements it correctly and as a client. The same goes for POP. Now
why in the world would you want HTTP or FTP in your MUA!? I use a
web browser when I want to browse the web :-). But again, the browser
correctly implements its responsibilities as an HTTP client and the
issue doesn't arise. Well, actually, IE doesn't -- thus when there is
an error of any sort it simply drools and says "duh ...." but doesn't
help you to identify or correct the problem. That's the biggest
problem with a MUA trying to be half of an MTA. Most (all?) of them
don't succeed at doing that.
-D
--
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly.
It just happens to be selective about who it makes friends with.
-- Dave Parnas
http://dman13.dyndns.org/~dman/
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