On Mon, Feb 01, 2021 at 04:34:47PM -0000, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2021-02-01, José María Mateos <ch...@rinzewind.org> wrote: > > I was thinking about this. I have offlineimap running, so I have a > > local copy of all my mail, but the SMTP connection still goes > > through my mail provider, not locally. While I can appreciate the > > increase in speed that a local rely can offer, I wonder if it > > doesn't add another layer of complexity
In terms of the delivery process, it doesn't add a layer of complexity, it just adds a hop. SMTP is designed to work this way... If you look at the headers of all of your incoming messages, you might see half a dozen or more Recieved: headers on them. Each one which isn't your senders' outgoing mail gateways or your incoming mail server represents an MTA your message travels through to get from them to you. The only control over this which you have is which server your own outgoing messages hit first: A local MSA/MTA, your ISP's or organization's outgoing mail relay, or your recipients' first-hop MX mail server. If your connection to the internet is reliable, it makes very little difference which one, in almost all cases. No added complexity--just potentially additional hops. There may be extra complexity in the software you have to manage, for your outgoing mail to work, though. > > as I would have to be monitoring the logs to make sure the e-mail > > was actually sent. > > You do (or you need to make sure that you receive bounce/retry/failure > notices properly). You don't... every major MTA has a tool for monitoring the outgoing mail queue. You just run it and it tells you if there is any pending outgoing e-mail. If this is a concern, you can run it periodically from cron (or whatever), in such a way that it only e-mails you when there are issues (i.e. pending mail). If you find some messages are lingering, then you can go look at your logs to figure out why. > > How does it work when the remote e-mail server is not available or > > it returns some kind of error. Can one receive local messages that > > notify of a problem? > > If you set up your local MTA properly, yes. In practice you probably won't do this, unless you have the luxury of operating a relay that is purely for outgoing messages that can't receive mail from the internet. Otherwise the reality is you'll get tons of bogus bounce messages that are just spam. Or perhaps you'll use some spam filtering to figure out which bounce messages actually matter... There are better alternatives, like what I described above. > My internet connection is reliable enough that the benefits of knowing > that each email has actually been sent _far_ outweigh the > inconvienience of having to manually resend something once every 5-6 > years. YMMV. I have maintained my own server for ~20+ years now and the only time I've had issues was when I was running it on consumer broadband and people started using blacklists that included essentially all known consumer broadband networks to block spam (whther it was or not), and when I had a connectivity outage. For the most part the mail system will automatically recover from outages, so that wasn't a big deal... mail got delivered the first time the queue was run after connectivity was restored. Moving to inexpensive hosting solved the other problem--I haven't had any issues for well over 10 years... If you're using your ISP's gateway, you should likewise not have any issues, unless they are just bad at it. > > So far I like my current solution because it avoid this: sending an > > e-mail takes a few seconds (very few, 2 - 3 tops) but when the process > > is done on mutt I know the remote server has the e-mail. It does have a down side though... if your recipient's mail gateway is down or unreachable, sending your mail will fail, and you'll have to try again manually, until it eventually succeeds. If you use an outgoing mail relay it fixes this for you by periodically retrying the message. This is pretty rare these days though so it probably won't matter to you very much, unless you have frequent recipients with proven unreliable mail gateways. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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