On 09-Oct-07 15:52:27, David Reynolds wrote:
Ted,
On 9 Oct 2007, at 4:04 pm, (Ted Harding) wrote:
Perhaps I'd better confess. I'm sending regular emails to an address abroad, routinely via my ISP (Zen). From time to time, I run into a bunch of delivery failures (usually timeouts), and I often get the error messages several (up to 10) hours later. Since these are work-related, loss of time has consequences.
I've located the SMTP servers for the remote site, and have had success in using bare-hands 'telnet ... 25' SMTP dialogue.
You could just set up the mailserver that you're telneting to as another outgoing mailserver in your mail client and send the email like that. Obviously this would only work for the one company you're trying to email.
In theory, yes. In practice, it would probably get too complicated. I've identified about 8 different hosts that act as mailservers there, and they tend to be somewhat randomly available.
Even the blanket "mail.***.***.***" doesn't always respond (though then another one might), and when it does is either "itself" or appears to be aliased to one of the others (I've seen the IP change from what 'telnet' announces it's connecting to, and what the server gives as its IP when it signs off).
Also, I'd have to run a differently configured instance of my mail client (XFMail) since I can choose one but only one of sendmail, SMTP or POP as "send" method. I'm normally on "sendmail in background" (i.e. outgoing mail gets batched in an outbox until I give the go-ahead), and I'd need to switch to SMTP; I'd also have to change the SMTP host configuration. In practice this would all mean shutting down my normal instance and starting one with a different config file; and then I'd still potentially be stymied by the multi-server situation described above.
My strategy so far is to "round-robin" my list until I get a definite response, and carry on from there. This looks like something that expect should be able to handle, provided I can anticipate the different responses that could occur in different situations (including recalcitrant remote server following apparently successful connection)..
Thanks, Ted.
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