Frederic L . W . Meunier [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 11:51:55PM -0500, Jeremy Blosser wrote:
> > Raju K V [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> > > Suppose my machine does not have smtp capabilities? ie it does not have
> > > sendmail or any other MTA, can I use another machine as smtp host? I am
> > > looking for something equivalent to pine's smtp-server option.
> >
> > When you have pine doing this, your machine /does/ have SMTP capabilities
> > and an MTA installed - Pine. Pine speaks SMTP to the remote host you
> > specify to get the message there.
> >
> > Mutt doesn't believe in wasting developers' time and bloating the code base
> > this way. There are plenty of real MTAs out there, get one of them.
>
> I'm sorry, but I don't think implementing this would be a bad idea. I
> have to agree that Pine's capabilities to make use of a remote MTA
This is simply a fallacy. There is no such thing as a remote MTA, at least
not in the way you mean. Pine just includes the MTA as part of itself.
But it is still there.
> let new users (newbies...) choose this MUA and not Mutt, which is very
> complex, don't have a way to configure all the stuff using menus, etc.
> Now you need to choose if you want Mutt being used by people that
> don't want to have an MTA installed or configured (very hard for some
> of us), or let it to the experienced users only.
I think this decision was made some time ago. Arguably it was made before
Mutt existed, since Mutt is just keeping with standard Unix philosophies --
the things that made Unix Unix.
Getting and installing a minimal MTA is no harder than installing Mutt.
And once again, if your machine can send mail to the outside, IT HAS AN MTA
INSTALLED. We aren't yet at the stage where one machine can just wish mail
to be on another machine for delivery -- and even if we were, one could
argue that mail transport was still happening.
> I have seen a GUI MUA that let you choose if you want to use the
> sendmail binary directly or a host, but it was in an alpha stage and
> dont't seem to be maintained anymore.
Point being? There are lots of GUI mailers that do this. That doesn't
make it a good idea.
> Pine isn't the answer, but there are some good options not present in
> Mutt. BTW, you would need how many lines of code to implement such
> feature?
This isn't really the point, but sSMTP has around 1500 LOC, and it's an MTA
as minimal as they come.
--
Jeremy Blosser | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://jblosser.firinn.org/
-----------------+-------------------------+------------------------------
"If Microsoft can change and compete on quality, I've won." -- L. Torvalds
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