Re: sendmail on a laptop

[Ernie McCracken <holycrap cavtel net>]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 12:08:07AM -0400, Trevor Smith wrote:
> I haven't tried this at school yet, when I have traditionially had to use 
> mail.haligonian.com but I'm guessing that when I'm there, sympatico will deny 
> me use to their servers.
> 
> Does anyone have any advice on a simple, no manual intervention way to send 
> email from a laptop regardless of network that I'm attached to?

I have a similar problem.  I was having to switch between two different
SMTP servers depending on whether my laptop was at home or at work.

For awhile, I just used sendmail to deliver mail directly.  Then I found
that some of my mail was bouncing because ISPs had deemed my IP address
was part of a block of DHCP-assigned IP addresses.  This was presumably
done to keep spammers and virus-infected machines from sending mail
directly from their PC.

I use mutt[1] and esmtp[2].  I have two scripts: mutt-home and mutt-work.

mutt-home runs mutt with a .muttrc that invokes esmtp with an .esmtprc that
uses my ISP's SMTP server.

mutt-work runs mutt with a .muttrc that invokes esmtp with an .esmtprc that
uses the SMTP server at work.

There are probably more elegant ways to handle this, but I find this
works well for me.  Maybe this will give you some ideas.

[1] http://www.mutt.org/
[2] http://esmtp.sf.net/