Daniel Stenberg wrote:

> The new protocols are as the subject says: IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. They
will include their SSL/TLS-based variations IMAPS, POP3S and SMTPS as
well as the "STARTTLS" approach to upgrade from plain connection to
SSL/TLS.

This is great! I would be very happy to try the SMTP protocol.

> SMTP is for sending data to a server, and unfortunately SMTP doesn't
have a defined URL syntax so I'm still a bit undecided on how it'll work
exactly.
> There's a mailto: URL format, but that doesn't really work for SMTP.
I'm open for suggestions from you libcurl hackers on this!

I started attempting to implement SMTP(S) months ago, but the work is
stalled since then due to lack of time, and some libcurl procedures
used have been altered too much to resurrect this work :-(
In this attempt, I just noted that libcurl cannot do the job of a real
SMTP server transmitter. In particular, it cannot retry temporary errors
(like the ones caused by greylisting) after some delay. As a
consequence, I think libcurl should be used only as a simple
transmitter, like the ones you can find in any mail client, and thus
connect to a predefined (in URL?) forwarder MTA rather than trying to
process DNS MX records. That is why I rejected the "mailto" URL schema
and started implementing a very simple URL
(smtp[s]://[user[:password]@]host[:port]) in addition with two more
CURLOPTs: CURLOPT_MAIL_SENDER (char *) and CURLOPT_MAIL_RECIPIENTS
(struct curl_slist *).

I'm really glad you decided to step into SMTP !

Cheers,
Patrick
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Received on 2009-11-27