Re: [nmh-workers] logging outgoing messages

[Ken Hornstein]

>>Personally, I'd just suggest keeping the local MTA, having post deliver
>>to that, and let it do the logging
>
>That's exactly what I've always done, from time immemorial until just
>about two weeks ago.
>
>Ironically enough I actually prefer to do it this way, but I was under the
>impression that this is deprecated in modern configurations.  I'd be happy
>to be wrong about that.

Let me expand on that a bit.

I have zero plans on deprecating support for the sendmail/smtp and
sendmail/pipe MTS transports in nmh.  I did think about removing spost
support (that's how sendmail/pipe USED to work, you used a different
post program called 'spost') but a bunch of people spoke up and I
figured since there was a need, we should keep it.  We did merge the
spost into post so support was easier and cleaned up the documentation
a fair amount.  It's here to stay.

Now yes, I still think it's a terrible IDEA to use it; that's why I make
jokes about it.  However, that's different than the sendmail/smtp and
'pure' smtp interfaces, as they are still speaking SMTP and you can do
things there you can't do with sendmail/pipe (in case you are not familiar,
sendmail/smtp involves running sendmail with some special flags that let
you speak SMTP to it on standard input; many MUAs do not support this).

But for the larger issue of whether or not you should submit email to
your own SMTP server or your email provider's ... well, obviously my
OPINION is that you should submit it to your email provider's server
directly from nmh (see previous emails on why I think this).  But plenty
of people disagree with me on this, and that's fine.  If you're the sort
of person who doesn't have a problem configuring your own SMTP server,
then fine, you should do that!  But I think recommending that to people
is a mistake; it creates the impression that you need to run your own
SMTP server to use nmh, and that is absolutely not true.

This is the classic argument when it comes to nmh; where do we fall on
the toolbox approach?  Is an MUA really a MUA if it cannot send and read
email in modern configurations without the help of other tools?  I think
the answer is 'no', but others have their own opinions.

--Ken