Success with Sending email without a SMTP Server!!!!

[kee nethery]

On Jan 30, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Andre Garzia wrote:
>> I am most pleased to announce that we can send email from Rev in pure 
>> transcript without a need for SMTP Server or email account. I just 
>> create a stack that will show how to do it. You can fetch the 
>> destination email, for example dan at shafermedia.com, then ask the DNS 
>> server for a SMTP Server that is responsible for that email, then 
>> talk directly with that server.
>
> I don't understand:
>
> If a conversation with an SMTP server doesn't include a password, what 
> will be the outcome?

conversations with SMTP servers do not include passwords. Your SMTP 
server might decide to not "relay" your email to the destination SMTP 
server if your SMTP server can not validate that you are someone it 
handles mail for. And it might use a password to do that. But if you 
are sending email to someone on your SMTP server, your SMTP server will 
in most circumstances, accept that email without asking for a password 
from the sender.

> Surely no one in 2005 aids spammers by turning off the default 
> requirement for SMTP authentication (if they did they should be fired 
> and forced to wear T-shirt in public reading "I'm the reason you get 
> spam").
>
> So if I understand you correctly it still comes down to the question: 
> Is Dan comfortable handing is SMTP password to anyone with a copy of 
> Interarchy or other traffic monitoring tool?

No, you have a misunderstanding about SMTP mail. Relaying is the 
functionality that spammers use that is evil. Most SMTP servers these 
days will not accept email to relay to another server unless they 
authenticate the sender with the sender's password. But almost all SMTP 
servers will accept email that is destined for a user on that specific 
server that is accepting the email. That is what SMTP servers do.

> Did I miss something?  Are you suggestion Dan build a mini-SMTP-server 
> capability with into his software?

What Andre has created is the SMTP sender portion of an SMTP server. 
This can be very useful when the stack is on a network segment that 
does not allow you to send emails to your SMTP server (which would 
relay the email to the correct destination server), yet you want to 
send an email.

Kee