[Twisted-Python] questions about Twisted mail

[Matthew Scott]

On Tue 2003-07-29 01:23, Tommi Virtanen wrote:
> > POP3 access to account: PASS
> > SMTP Mail from outside domain to outside domain: FAIL
> 	Huh? This means people cannot use vanity domains. That's
> 	generally not what you want.
>       [ ... ]
> 	If what you want is relay control, the traditional (and good!)
> 	mechanism for that is knowing what IP addresses belong to your
> 	organization, accept mail to outside domains only from those
> 	IP addresses.

Yes, it was relay control I was looking for.  I have seen some ISPs use SMTP 
AUTH to control relaying, but for our use of an e-mail server it will be fine 
to limit by IP addresses.  (That will also alleviate silly tech support 
issues that would arise from requiring SMTP AUTH :)


> 	Umm, I hope you do mean _authenticated (E)SMTP_, not just
> 	ESMTP? Because the only real difference between SMTP and ESMTP
> 	is whether the client says HELO or EHLO.

Yes.  Thank you :)  To put what I mentioned in my original e-mail another way, 
I haven't kept my brain up to spec regarding the details of SMTP vs ESMTP and 
where AUTH falls in, as well as related RFCs.  :)


> 	I've said this earlier, and I'll say it again. twisted.mail is
> 	not really ready for production use yet. It can still lose
> 	email.

That alone tells me that in the short term any efforts to use the existing 
Twisted mail would not be useful, and that I should be researching the use of 
more 'traditional' email server configurations :)

I might have perhaps run across this if I did an extensive search in the 
mailing list archives, but my resource was grepping the Twisted CVS for 
'twisted mail'.  The only thing I ran across that had any depth to its 
description was doc/historic/2002/ipc10/twisted-network-framework/index.html 
and it had no mention of not using Twisted mail in a production environment.

I'm not saying that it's a bad thing that I couldn't find more definitive 
information -- after all if something is not ready for production use then 
it's probably not a good thing to give people lots of easy ways to believe 
that it is :)


> > How would one keep usernames on different domains separate in terms of
> >  logging in with POP3 and authenticating with ESMTP?  E.g.
> > "jdoe at domain1.com" and "jdoe at domain2.com"
> 	By authenticating as jdoe at domain1.com, not as joe.

'tis what I tried...

+OK <20030729152108.1218.1275775558 at advocate>
USER test
+OK USER accepted, send PASS
PASS 1234
+OK Authentication succeeded

+OK <20030729152118.1218.400479354 at advocate>
USER test at test.example.com
+OK USER accepted, send PASS
PASS 1234
-ERR Authentication failed

+OK <20030729152133.1218.265884954 at advocate>
USER test%test.example.com
+OK USER accepted, send PASS
PASS 1234
-ERR Authentication failed


> 	Scalemail is quite close to first real deployment. It uses parts
> 	of twisted.mail. http://scalemail.sf.net/  (I really need to update
> 	the web site ;)

I will take a look at this and see what I can glean from it. I see CVS commits 
in the last 2 months, and a 'debian' directory in there, so I'm happy even if 
the website isn't up-to-date :-D

Thanks for the link and the info on the status of Twisted mail!


-- 
Matthew R. Scott
OMAjA / http://www.omaja.com/