On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 04:33:58PM -0600, David Champion wrote: > * On 07 Nov 2012, Derek Martin wrote: > > On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 08:48:08PM +0000, Chris Green wrote: > > > server retrying if my SMTP server isn't running (or connected). That's > > > one of the reasons I'd quite like to move away from SMTP. It *should* > > > be OK but I'm relying on the other end to behave properly. > > > > It will. It has to. If it didn't, e-mail on the internet would be > > horribly unreliable. > > I hate to break it to you, but.... :) > > I've used IMAP pickup in the past and it's OK for some IMAP servers. A > year or two ago my employer moved my mailbox to MS Exchange. Exchange > doesn't (necessarily?) hand you the exact e-mail it received. It > parses incoming mail, stores the parsed components, and reconstructs > the message the best it can figure when you pick it up via IMAP or POP. > Along the way it might modify or remove some components for no good > reason; for example, multipart/alternative with text/plan and text/html > invisibly becomes just a text/html message. I've also heard of its > breaking crypto, although I haven't seen that myself for a while. > > So I forward my mail via SMTP away from my employer now. > Yes, I realise there are good and bad places that deliver mail to you! :-)
If I move from SMTP delivery to collecting it myself (from POP3 or IMAP) it will be from exactly the same source, my Tsohost web hosting service which (in many people's opinions) is excellent. All I have to do is change the ultimate destination of all my E-Mail from zbmc.eu (whose MX record points at my home LAN) to a POP3 mailbox on the TsoHost servers and then collect from that POP3 mailbox. I'm thinking in fact that I'm going to stay with much the same system as I already have but my Python filter script will collect E-Mail direct from the Tsohost POP3 server instead of having it fed into its standard input by the .forward. I already have *another* Python script that collects mail from a Tsohost POP3 box so I know how to do that already, all I need to do is merge a few bits of existing code. -- Chris Green
