send email from command line

[Erik Christiansen]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:20:43AM -0400, Rashkae wrote:
> 
> The point is even more moot since running am MTA on your desktop has
> become a casualty of the fight against SPAM, and they no longer work
> well out of the box without manual configuration of smarthost forwarding
> to your ISP, some of which don't even support this anymore.

Yes, and there are snares there. The package post-installation script
for postfix, on ubuntu 7.10, with "Internet site with smarthost"
selected, asked "SMTP Relay Host:  -> ", to which I replied
"mail.internode.on.net". That worked fine for some months, then suddenly
posts to sourceforge were being swallowed.

But "postconf -n" showed:
relayhost = mail.internode.on.net
which looked OK, at first glance.

Fetching postfix-doc quickly revealed  (in BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README)
that the required file syntax is:
relayhost = [mail.internode.on.net]

So it seems that the post-installation script misconfigured this simple
common case. It took seconds to fix, but a little longer to diagnose.

> For the curious, this e-mail is being forward from postfix on my
> desktop, not my ISP smtp, and if you're one of the 5% of the internet
> that can no longer receive e-mails directly from me because of it, I've
> stopped caring.

Can you post to lists at sourceforge? ;-)
(It's when you'd really like to post to a spam-defended list, that
perspective changes, I find.)

Erik

-- 
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
                                                        -- Thomas Paine