Subject: RE: Plausibility of sendmail?
From: "AG" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: "\"Joaquin\"" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 23:17:09 -0800

I didn't want to send this to the whole [email-masked] mailing list,
but when I googled for "cygwin sendmail" Brian's email asking why
in the world anyone would want to run sendmail on cygwin came up
first.

Here's why I am interested:

(0) I am *not* interested in running a production mail server
under CYGWIN

(1) I want to use CYGWIN to allow me to use NMH to read email
on my TabletPC running Windows XP TabletPC edition - and to finally
allow me to get off Microsoft Outlook.

I want to read email on my TabletPC because, well, I *like* the TabletPC
even if it is not UNIX. And Linux does not yet run on the TabletPC and
preserve many of the useful TabletPC features.

(By the way, I do not want to run NMH on VMware on my TabletPC 
because I have run VMware, in the past, and find that VMware is much 
more of a hassle than CYGWIN.)

NMH can be configured to send email directly to an SMTP server,
but this is not sufficient to meet my needs
   a) this is a TabletPC, a mobile device, which frequently is not 
       connected.  I.e. outgoing mail needs to be queued and sent
       later when the outgoing SMTP server is accessible.
   b) I need to route email selectively: my company mail is not
       supposed to go through my personal, non-company, ISP,
       and vice versa.

In my limited understanding I require more than just connecting
to an SMTP server; I need a mail transport agent that can queue
outgoing mail for several different outgoing mail servers.

Why SendMail?   Yes, I know just how horrible sendmail is.
I welcome advice on alternatives, such as exim or ssmtp.

The main reason I am interested in using SendMail on CYGWIN
with NMH is that NMH already has support for talking to SendMail:
in /usr/local/nmh/mts.conf, you can just say "SendMail", and it is
supposed to work. 

Yes, that leaves the ugly job of doing a sendmail.cf;
but my configuration is simple enough that I can crib most of
it.

Now, I have never used ssmtp or exim.  Are they really drop in replacements
for sendmail from the commandline / protocol level?   (Not from the
sendmail.cf file level.) 

I.e. if I configure NMH by putting the path to exim in the SendMail entry in mts.conf,
will it just work?

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