On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 11:31:55AM +1300, Don Stokes wrote:
Yeah, but both ETRN and connection mailbagging have the disadvantage that they initiate the connection from the ISP end, which is messy from a firewall / NAT point of view.
I would argue for *most* people it's preferable as almost everything supports this mode of operation. All that it requires is that you can do something intelligent with tcp/25 inbound, which pretty much is a no-brainer for anyone who is capable of running a mail-system (as opposed the average conslutant who installs exchange and buggers of, several hundred dollars richer, to leave the customer to suffer).
It also means that it's hard to synchronise -- you can't write a simple script that goes "dial up, download mail, disconnect" -- you're into a "dial up, wait a bit, wait for activity to go away, disconnect" kind of mode. Ick.
Dialup & idle-off works for many people.
RFC 2645 ATRN is "better" in that the connection is managed from the client end
Except so few pieces of software support this verses plain old SMTP which almost everything supports. Also, ATRN is a PITA to implement for many mail servers which may explain why it's been very slow and being implemented.
Much the same effect can be achieved by using POP with the envelope information inserted as headers, which does seem to be more widely implemented.
POP is a terrible way to do this. POP != SMTP. They solve different problems. I should have you beaten for even mentioning it. --cw - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog