cannot send smtp email with exim

[Alexandra Zaharia]

Hi Peter,

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Peter Smerdon <psmerdon at magma.ca> wrote:
>  Yes, perhaps this is a case of me posting without thinking things
>  through. I used to work in town all the time and occasionally on the
>  road. My desktop at home runs Debian unstable with exim4 as the default
>  MTA. I would let fetchmail place my mail onto the spool and read it with
>  Gnus (an emacs client). Sending mail was of course handled by exim.
>
>  I don't remember to be honest how I set up exim4 to authenticate but it
>  works.

I see... as I recall Debian comes with exim4 by default - at least
that's how I _think_ it was back when I tried Etch RC4. It would be
interesting to compare the Debian setup on your home computer with
what you have now on Ubuntu and see which are the differences that
make exim4 on Debian work for your concrete issue.

>  Then when I travel all I used to do was ssh into my home desktop and run
>  my email client inside gnu screen. This i swhat I am currently doing
>  however now my job takes me away from home much more so I thought why
>  not just duplicate the setup on my laptop, and when I travel, remove the
>  fetchmail command from my desktop's crontab and add a fetchmail crontab
>  to my laptop and then simply rsync the two machines when I get home.

Good point.

>  The problem I am facing is that ubuntu is new to me and I am having
>  difficulty setting up an MTA.
>
>  As you suggested, I shall see if Gnus (my MUA) itself can do smtp, it
>  appears that it can. Because of the ssh I avoided graphical clients like
>  Evolution, and am quite happy with Gnus now so changing clients inst
>  really an option.

Sometimes when I'm at work I *neeeed* to run graphical applications
from my home PC so I enabled X forwarding on my openssh-server:

grep -i forw /etc/ssh/sshd_config
X11Forwarding yes

Then all I need to do is ssh -X -p <port> <user at host> and I can launch
any GUI-app I want.

>  So if you were to spend 5 weeks working and then 10 days at home, in a
>  repeating cycle, would you set up your desktop or laptop to be the
>  primary recipient? I don't like leaving the desktop running for 5 weeks
>  at a time just to receive emails but I can't think of a better solution.

Well to be honest, I leave the home PC on anyway, because I have a
http server that needs to be up. :-) But this isn't the merriest thing
to do whatsoever in your case, if you'd need to leave it running only
for e-mail.

>  Thanks for your patience, I hope that clarified somewhat my situation.

No problem, I was trying to understand your situation better and see
if I can be of help.

> I managed to get smtp working directly through my client  following:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/smtpmail.html
>
> Thanks for that idea Alex!

Wow, cool! Great! I'm glad you found a solution! :-)

Cheers,

Alex.