[X-Unix] Maintaining SSH connections *or* elegant management of multiple SMTP

[Jeff Porten]

On Apr 3, 2004, at 11:54 AM, Norman Cohen wrote:

> Have you looked at Postfix Enabler? It provides a very nice way to 
> turn on Postfix on your Mac and use it as your smtp server as well as 
> setting up pop or imap access. You might want to set this up on your 
> home machine with smtp authorization and ssl access (both configurable 
> with Postfix Enabler). Using ssl, you would avoid having to keep a 
> tunnel up and running, I think. Read the supporting documentation for 
> the program. Also O'Reilly has a nice book out on Postfix and there 
> are a total of 4 books on postfix at Amazon listed as of today.

Don't need Postfix, I've got WebCrossing running on my laptop and on my 
home server.  All of the SMTP, none of the fuss.  I use it for web 
development, but the POP/IMAP/SMTP server by itself is free.

<http://webcrossing.com/express/>

But I'm not sure if having my own SMTP servers solves my problem.  Port 
25 is blocked on most of my roaming networks.  When I can get through, 
there's any number of reasons why my SMTP server might be tagged as a 
spam server (no reverse DNS, for one).  I can SSH tunnel and have my 
mail *client* handshake with my home ISP, but I don't know if that 
ISP's SMTP will relay from a mail *server* -- as I understand it, mail 
clients and mail servers do their SMTP connections differently, right?

The other reason I'm leery about running my mail through local SMTP, it 
gives me one more place to have my mail get hung up.  Right now, if 
mail doesn't go through, I can see it right there in my outbox, rather 
than in an SMTP admin window.