send email from command line

[Karl Larsen]

Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 17:03 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>   
>> Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
>>     
>
>   
>>> There is a distinct difference between SMTP and writing a mail message
>>> to a file.  SMTP is a transport protocol which defines the interaction
>>> between a client (sender) and a server (receiver) to move a mail message
>>> from one to the other.  You may be confusing the difference between the
>>>       
>> Don't be insulting.  Of course I'm not confusing anything.  There _isn't_ a
>> distinct difference.  There's nothing essentially different between the
>> following conversation (system responses trimmed for clarity):
>>     
>
> Whatever.  Read the protocol specs.  You are comparing apples to
> oranges.
>
>   
>> and:
>>  derek at bella:~$ mailx -s "test mailx" derek
>>  this is the message
>>  .
>>
>> (and mailx's actual dialog with sendmail is more complicated than that...)
>>     
>
> There is no dialogue in mailx's interaction with the sendmail process.
> It is simply a unidirectional pipe from mailx to sendmail down which the
> message is passed.  mailx checks the exit code of the sendmail process
> to see if the operation was successful.  It is a trivial operation
> compared to handling a bidirectional SMTP dialogue.
>
>   
>>> Why go through all the muck of setting up a
>>> network connection 
>>>       
>> In Unix, "all the muck" of setting up a network connection has never  been
>> harder than opening a file (well, maybe once - before my time - but a
>> network connection and a file are both just sockets).
>>     
>
> It is a tad harder and handling the dialog is definitely harder than
> managing a unidirectional pipe to a forked process.  Take a look at the
> client smtp code in sendmail and compare it with the pipe/fork handling
> of sending a mail messages in mailx sometime.
>   
    Well reading man exim and common sense tells me if sendmail or exim 
are going to send your mailx message out to the world it must have at 
the very least a source for DNS service and a registered IP number. How 
these are sent to the software is very obscure.

    If all you want is to use mailx between users on your computer mailx 
has that capability built in and you don't need sendmail. If you want to 
reach out to the Internet from mailx you need sendmail properly set up 
to do this, and I for one are not smart enough to do this.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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