Chris Wedgwood
CLEARnet had a product that did essentially what you want (not RFC2645 though): Mailbagging. Thirty seconds after connecting their system will start pumping your queued mail down to you... making sure it was delivered before removing it at their end.
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. 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. RFC 2645 ATRN is "better" in that the connection is managed from the client end, but IMAO, SMTP is the wrong way to do this -- SMTP *servers* are mainly geared to getting mail in rather than out; at best ATRN basically launches an SMTP *client* inside the context of the server, which to my mind is a bit yucky. 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. It's still yucky though, and POP does have the problem that you can't easily bounce messages before downloading them; you can download the headers and from that issue a bounce message, but you can't just issue a "550 bugger off" message in the same way as you can with SMTP. -- don - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog