[Glastonbury] (no subject)

[Kelvin McNulty]

On Saturday 11 October 2003 19:39, Sean Miller wrote:
>> What is a SMTP server?

>Are you coming to this meeting on Wednesday, Tom?

>If so, perhaps we'll have a 20 minute discussion about the workings of
>e-mail (?)

Sounds good to me. I once tried using the local email transport software 
(Fetchmail and Sendmail) to handle the mail and got into a bit of a tangle...

I have got clarity in my head about connecting to other people's email servers 
but I do know that if you aren't careful with how you configure Sendmail then 
spammers can get in there and spew out millions of messages... aaaaargh!

I'd also like to know more about secure ways to log onto email servers and 
configure servers and clients for that - have heard of things like apop, 
IMAP, using SSL with email, etc. etc., but NO WAY am I going to start mucking 
about with those on my regular machine... until I understand them.

And I've noticed how pop3 allows one to look on the server and get a list of 
the messages and how large they are so one can reject large ones (KMail and 
Eudora (Windows) both have this ability - very good for stopping viruses).

A technical wizzz that I know showed me how to work SMTP and POP3 servers 
using Telnet/SSH, I don't remember all the commands but you can find them on 
the Web. This is very useful if you get blockages because you can see exactly 
what's going wrong.

Best,

Kelvin