Re: [Sheflug] am I on yet?

[Richard Stevenson <nospam [at] team.xtra.co.nz>]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Chris J/#6 wrote:

> Qmail for me ... extensive filtering & a couple of SMTP routes...plus it's a 
> piece of cake to plonk a POP toaster into :) Qmail lacks at fancy 
> header-rewriting stuff, but a lot of the time you don't need it, or it can be 
> handled at the client side ... ther server should /very rarely/ have to 
> rewrite headers :)

You'd think so.  I used to configure the VUW mail hubs, and they've got
many really dim clients there... so we did a lot of mapping to and from
@vuw.ac.nz addresses.  I think I'm probably the last one to do any serious
work on that system... Sean?

> I've no idea what AUTH is (though I can guess) nor STARTTLS (which I can't 
> guess), and for my single person installation, I doubt they're needed :) I 
> gave up with sendmail when I tried to configure it one day...it's a mare :)

SMTP AUTH is a way of authenticating yourself to the mail system; the
biggest plus is that MTAs that support it can be configured to allow you
to relay from anywhere in the world of you authenticate first.  It's cool
:-)  RFC2554 for more info.

STARTTLS involves negotiating with the MTA to transfer the mail within an
SSLv3/TLSv1 session.  Also really cool, and should be required if you want
to use AUTH with stupid clients like Netscape or OutHouse, which basically
send your username and password in clear text during the AUTH part of the
transaction.  Better clients use MD5 challenge-response systems, but that
in turn requires a shared secret...

Now I'm just waiting for them to implement ATRN, which combines TURN with
strong authentication (a la AUTH) - finally, batched SMTP without it
being some strange hack... :-)

Cheers

R


-- 
Richard Stevenson                       |    Help Microsoft stamp out software
Systems Support Specialist              |    piracy: install Linux today!
richard.stevenson@team.xtra.co.nz       |
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