[IRCServices] what do they think ?

[Ian R. Justman]

On Fri, 8 Oct 1999, Andrew Church wrote:

>      For the record, the proper way to do this would be to open a direct SMTP
> connection to a known mail server and send the mail over that connection,
> using select() to monitor the status of the connection (and timing out in a
> reasonable period of time to prevent people from using up all file
> descriptors by sending lots of SENDPASS requests).  Note that a proper
> implementation of this functionality requires quite a bit of work, including
> redoing the main program loop and I/O code to be able to monitor multiple
> sockets at once; this is why I never got around to adding this functionality.
> If it were as simple as writing a function like the original poster did, I
> would have done it long ago.

Listar and Majordomo 2 are examples of mailing list software which make
use of what Andy's discussing here.  SmartList and Majordomo 1.9x all use
an invocation of sendmail from the command line.

Though if using a sendmail command line is your cup of tea, the best thing
to do is to read up on what's safe for CGI code because this is along
those same lines, notably sanitizing command lines, the environment, etc. 

Furthermore, if your MTA understands the sendmail -bs command (or
something similar), you can still write SMTP code, but then, you can
communicate either via a pipe (command line) or a socket (network
connection).

Plus I myself would use a considerably safer MTA, such as Postfix, which
is what I use for my own personal mailserver and EsperNet's server.  None
of it runs setuid to ANY user, and only what absolutely needs to run as
root is running as root (only one process, specif. master which grabs port
25, does local delivery, etc). 

Just food for thought. :)

--Ian R. Justman, Co-Founder and Postmaster, The EsperNet IRC Network.

-----
Ian R. Justman (NIC handle IJ12)  ianj at esper.net (Official EsperNet business)
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