[gentoo-user] Re: Simple SMTP to cmd-line MTA relay?

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2018-01-19, Ian Zimmerman <itz@very.loosely.org> wrote:
> On 2018-01-19 20:19, Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> >>>> Can exim transfer mail to an Exchange server that doesn't expose an
>> >>>> SMTP server?
>> >>>
>> >>> Errr, no. exim does SMTP.
>> >>>
>> >>> If the above is what you need, any orthodox mail server would need
>> >>> to hand the mail over to something that *can* deliver to Exchange.
>> >> 
>> >> Yes, and that something is my existing command-line MTA utility
>> >> that has the same usage as /usr/bin/sendmail.
>
> FWIW, you can plug in your existing script into exim as a custom
> "transport", in the exim terminology.  In fact that is what I used to do
> for years, to stuff outgoing mail into sendmail on a system where I had
> a shell account.  But if I understand the problem now (a well sized if,
> LOL) that doesn't by itself help you because the existing script is
> broken; replacing the script is the main part of the problem.  Right?

The existing /usr/bin/sendmail (that's not it's actual path) script
works fine.  It's the SSL support in the SMTP server that invokes the
/usr/bin/sendmail script that's broken.  I've modified that server to
run an instance of stunnel and use plain SMTP (sans SSL).  It looks
like that's probably going to work.  There's a custom SSL server
because at some point in the past it had to do some odd things with
headers and the envelope from field (it also implements some special
logging).  Then at some later point in the past, the requirement for
those odd things went away.  At some other point in history, the SSL
support in that server got broken.  The actual failure is intermittent
(it depends on message size and network timing), so it's taken a while
to track it down and decide what to do about it.

For now, I'm going with the custom server and stunnel.  If there are
problems with that, I'll try one of sendmail/postfix/exim.  [One of
the hassles with those is that portage won't allow me to install any
of them because they conflict with msmtp, which is what I use for
sending normal e-mail.]

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