The struggle to use Gnus on Verizon

[Joe Fineman]

I recently switched from a dial-up ISP account at "The World"
(Software Tool & Die) to a broadband Verizon account.  Since I use Gnu
Emacs in conjunction with news and mail reader Gnus, I needed to edit
my ~/.emacs file to reflect the new ISP's news server, incoming (POP3)
mail and outgoing (SMTP) mail servers.

Fortunately, I have a friend who is a real programmer, and he was able
to accomplish this.  The following notes are his:

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In the course of this switch, I discovered that Verizon requires SMTP
authentication (but without TLS or SSL) in order to permit outgoing
mail.

I discovered a document entitled "Emacs SMTP Library" (Copyright 2003,
2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.) which contains instructions
(Section 3, "Authentication") describing how to tell Gnus (via
variables smtpmail-auth-credentials, etc.)  to perform the
authentication exchange with an SMTP server that requires
authentication:  http://josefsson.org/smtpmail.html

However, despite having downloaded the very latest precompiled version
of Emacs 21.3 (for Windows), it turned out after many fruitless
attempts to send mail that I needed to replace the version of
"smtpmail.el" actually included with the current Emacs distribution
with a patched version of this file also, it turned out, to be found
at the Web site where I found the "Emacs SMTP Library" document:
http://josefsson.org/smtpmail.el

I only found the patched smtpmail.el as a result of following some
advice in that "Emacs SMTP Library" to set a variable called
"smtpmail-debug-verb", which, it turned out, was not even defined in
the standard Emacs distribution version of smtpmail.el.  Doing a Web
search for "smtpmail-debug-verb" led back to Simon Josefsson's Web
site, and the patched version of smtpmail.el.

It was extremely inobvious that I needed to use a special version of
smtpmail.el in order to get my outgoing email to work with my new ISP,
and I wonder why this patch is not included in the standard current
Emacs distribution.
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-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  A racket is any enterprise whose working morale depends on  :||
||:  contempt for the customer.                                  :||