Re: SMTP library problem

[David]

Stephen Berman <Stephen.Berman@gmx.net> writes:
>> swaks --auth --tls-on-connect -p 465 -s mail.myprovider.com
>
> Ah, thanks.  That works.

OK, then it's ssmtp.

>> If the above swaks command works, you can use an external tool like
>> stunnel to set up the SSL connection. If you have root on the machine,
>> you can use stunnel like this
>>
>> stunnel -f -c -d localhost:2000 -r mail.myprovider.com:465
>>
>> You should then be able to send mails through your localhost on port
>> 2000. Note that the '-f' option lets stunnel run in the foreground for
>> testing purposes. If it works, you can omit this option and let stunnel
>> run as daemon.
>
> I don't have root access to the machine that hosts the mail server, or
> do you mean the machine I use to send mail via the server?  

The latter.

> If the latter, how would I make Gnus aware of the tunnel?

Just point smptmail.el to your localhost on port 2000 (or whatever
you're writing in the above stunnel command).

> I instrumented smtpmail.el for Edebug and stepped through the code as I
> tried to send a mail.  The "freeze" occurred in smtpmail-read-response
> at the call to accept-process-output, which is from the Emacs C code.  I
> assume this means gnutls is not providing the server what it needs, so
> it just waits until it hits the timeout, but I don't know how to proceed
> to find out what is going wrong.

smptmail.el waits for the server greeting, which doesn't happen since
the server waits for you to initiate the TLS connection first (which you
can do using stunnel). It shouldn't be too difficult to adapt
smtpmail.el to deal with this, but AFAIK ssmtp simply isn't standardized
and every good mail provider should support SMTP+STARTTLS on the
standard port.

-David