ietf-smtp
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Re: DATA Pipelining

2009-12-26 10:13:52


On Dec 25, 2009, at 10:46 PM, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:


Hi all,

Just writing a minimal implementation of SMTP here to serve a very specific 
need, that of gatewaying news articles, and have wondered how to handle the 
DATA phase with regard to pipelined text.  As I see it, there is no reason 
not to pipeline both the message text lines and the final dot, because 
nothing is expected from the server and until the dot is received there is no 
change of state other than the accumulation of the DATA buffer.  But I also 
know there are implementations out there which don't like it when a command 
is incomplete, and try to respond to whatever is in their TCP buffer, and 
wondered if anybody knew how that might work for the final dot if it were 
stuffed at the end of some text.

Is there any specific guidance anywhere on this?  I tried RFC 2920 already.  
I really don't want to send each individual line as a single send, and I'm 
pretty sure that's not necessary or even common.  I do know sendmail saves 
its final dot for a final send, though.

You should be fine sending the entire payload as-is.

(Writing and testing a robust SMTP submission client is tedious, though, 
especially when you find you need to handle authentication. Pretty much every 
language has solid SMTP libraries available for it, so unless you have some 
unusual requirements you should take a look at libesmtp or Email::Send or 
whatever the common way of doing SMTP in your language of choice is).

Cheers,
  Steve

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